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his cufflinks have gone if his shirt had been removed? – full of tubes and surrounded by ambulance staff manhandling him, with his wounds on display, unconscious and lying sprawled in the middle of the street in a pool of blood, watched by passers-by and drivers alike. His wife would have been equally horrified by this image, if she had seen it, although she would probably have had neither the time nor the desire to read the newspapers the following day. While you weepfor and watch over and bury the dead, all uncomprehending, and when you have children to tell as well, you’re in no fit state for anything else, the rest does not exist. But she might have seen it afterwards, perhaps prompted by the same curiosity I felt a week later, and have gone on to the Internet to find out what other people had known at the time, not just close friends and family, but strangers like me. What effect would that have had on her? Her more distant friends would have found out via the press, from that local Madrid newspaper or from a death notice, one or even several must have appeared in various papers, as usually happens when someone wealthy dies. That photo, above all else that photo – as well as the manner of his death, foul and absurd and, how can I put it, tinged with misfortune – was what allowed Beatriz to refer to him as ‘the poor man’. No one would ever have called him that while he was alive, not even one minute before he got out of his car in that charming, peaceful part of town, next to the small garden surrounding the college, where there are trees and a drinks kiosk with a few tables and chairs, and where I’ve often sat with my young nephews. No, not even a second before Vázquez Canella opened his butterfly knife; apparently, you have to be quite skilled to open one of those double-handled things, which are, I believe, not available to buy and may even be banned. And now, there were no two ways about it, he would be that for ever: poor, unfortunate Miguel Deverne. Poor man.

 
    ‘Yes, it was his birthday, can you believe that? The world normally allows its characters to enter and leave the stage in too disorderly a fashion for someone actually to be born and to die on the same date, with a gap of fifty years, exactly fifty years, in between. It doesn’t make any sense, precisely because it seems to. It could so easily not have happened like that. It could have been any other day or no day. Better if it had never happened at all.’
    Several months passed before I saw Luisa Alday again, and a few more before I knew her name, that name, and before she spoke those words and many more. I didn’t know then if she talked continually about what had happened to her, with anyone prepared to listen, or if she had found in me a person with whom she felt comfortable opening up her heart, a stranger who would not report what she heard to any of her close friends or family and whose incipient friendship could be interrupted at any moment without explanation or consequences, and who was also compassionate, loyal and curious and whose face was both new to her and vaguely familiar and associated with happier times unclouded by sorrow, although I had always thought that she had barely noticed my presence, even less so than her husband.
    Luisa reappeared towards the tail-end of summer, late into September, and she arrived at the usual time, accompanied by two womenfriends or work colleagues; the tables were still set out on the pavement and I watched her arrive and sit or, rather, drop on to a chair; I saw how one of her friends grabbed her forearm with mechanical solicitude, as if fearing that Luisa might lose her balance and taking her friend’s fragility for granted. Luisa looked terribly thin and not at all well, and had the kind of profound pallor that blurs all the features, as though not only her skin had lost its lustre and its colour, but also her hair, brows, lashes, eyes, teeth and lips, all dull and diffuse. She seemed