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gleam of sympathy and sadness in her eyes.
    She was right: she had been a beautiful woman.
    When I asked her if she knew anything about Salvatierra’s painting, if he had ever told her he intended to give part of it away, she told me she wasn’t even aware that Salvatierra painted. She accompanied me to the exit, and on the way out showed me a plaque on the wall with a long list of names, including my father's. They were all retired employees who had worked at the Post Office for more than forty years.

18
    Out in the street I felt suddenly weary. I pedaled haphazardly towards the edge of town, where the streets looked as if they had been painted by Salvatierra: corner stores with peeling whitewash, people sitting out on the cool of the sidewalks, trees lopped to little more than stumps, and tethered cows grazing between the irrigation ditches. We would sometimes pass by here when he took me to school on the handlebars of his bike from our house near the Municipal Park.
    All at once, on an unpaved stretch of road, a black dog started barking at me and snapping at my feet. I saw that an old man with a white goatee was shouting at it from the doorway of his house. He was carrying a bag. Something about him made me look more closely. He seemed very similar to Mario Jordán, my father’s friend. I went over and shouted over the barking dog:
    “Are you Mario Jordán?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m Miguel Salvatierra, Juan's son.”
    “Ah, how’s things?”
    Jordán was wearing a vest, a pair of trousers, and rope sandals. He was trying to shut a bag overflowing with stuff. He must have been around eighty.
    “Are you going out?” I asked him.
    “Yes,” he said, peering up and down the street. “Could you give me a hand?”
    He passed me his bag, which I put on my handlebars. We set off together, walking slowly.
    “Where are we going?”
    “Down there, around the corner from the cemetery.”
    Every so often he’d turn and look behind him.
    “Let’s get a move on, I’m being followed,” he said, trying in vain to quicken his pace.
    I turned around, but couldn’t spot anyone.
    “Who’s following you?”
    “Someone I owe money to. Don’t look back.”
    He was dragging his feet as he walked. From time to time he’d raise a hand to point the direction we should be taking, as though he were clutching at the air to pull himself along.
    “Do you remember Salvatierra?” I ventured to ask.
    “Why on earth wouldn’t I?” he replied with a flash of anger, then said nothing more until we reached the street corner.
    “Do you remember he used to paint?”
    “Aha.”
    “Do you happen to know if he gave away one of the rolls of his painting?”
    “They’ve got new, quicker boats these days, but let’s go to the train station anyway,” he said.
    I repeated my question.
    “We’ll come to that,” he said, “we’ll come to that.”
    By now I was growing impatient. It had been a mistake to accompany him in the first place, and now he wanted to go to the train station.
    “There’s no train any more, Jordán,” I told him.
    “They’ve brought it back. There’s one at six-thirty.”
    We propped the bike against the brick wall of the station and climbed the steps. Grass was growing through the cracks in the cement floor. Everything was shut up. There was nobody about. There had been no trains for fifteen years. Jordán made me lift the bag up and put it down on the platform. The tracks were smothered in weeds.
    “Let’s be getting back, Jordán: the train doesn’t run anymore,” I said.
    “There’s one at half past six. D’you have a watch?”
    “Yes, it’s nearly seven,” I lied.
    ‘That doesn’t matter. It’s a bit late sometimes.”
    I didn’t know what to say, so I decided to humor him.
    “Are you going to travel in that vest?”
    He looked down and said:
    “Well I’ll be damned. They won’t let me on looking like this. Can you lend me your shirt?”
    When I refused, he wanted to open his bag to