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him that she never wanted to see him again. Muñoz says that he consoled Robledo by telling him that it’s always better to know about these drawbacks before getting married, but Robledo is still terribly angry. Today, I called him over and told him that I didn’t know about the situation with his girlfriend. I asked him why he hadn’t told me about it before, and he looked at me with sparks shooting from his eyes, and murmured: ‘You were quite aware of it. I’m sick of all your little jokes.’ He sneezed, out of pure nervousness, and quickly added, with an ample gesture of disappointment: ‘That they, who are terribly crass, can tell those jokes about me, I understand. But that you, who is every bit a serious man, would encourage them, honestly disappoints me a little. I’ve never told you, but I had a good opinion of you.’ I was feeling a bit awkward about having to defend his good opinion of me, so without a trace of irony I told him: ‘Look, believe me if you want to, and if you don’t, too bad. I didn’t know anything and that’s the end of it. Now get to work if you don’t want me to be disappointed too.’
Sunday 31 March
    This afternoon, as I was coming out of the California cinema, I saw the woman from the bus, the ‘elbow woman’, from a distance. She was walking with a heavily built man, athletic, but
not very bright. When the man laughed, it was as if he was reflecting the unexpected variants of human imbecility. She, too, would laugh, throwing her head back and pressing herself against him affectionately. They passed in front of me and although she saw me in the middle of a burst of laughter, she didn’t interrupt it. I couldn’t be sure that she had recognized me. In the meantime, though, she said to the centre-forward: ‘Oh, darling,’ and with a flirtatious and muscular move placed her head against his giraffe-patterned tie. Afterwards, they turned on Ejido Street. And now a big question: What does this woman have to do with the one who got undressed in record time the other afternoon?
Monday 1 April
    Today I was sent to meet the ‘Jew who comes looking for work’. He comes around every two or three months and the manager doesn’t know how to get rid of him. He’s a tall man, freckled, about fifty years old, who speaks Spanish horribly and probably writes it even worse. In his same old speech, he always reminds us that his specialty is being able to correspond in three or four languages, write shorthand in German, and cost accounting. He extracts a badly deteriorated letter from his pocket in which the head of personnel from some institute in La Paz, Bolivia, certifies that Mr Franz Heinrich Wolff performed his job to their complete satisfaction and left of his own free will. However, the expression on the man’s face is as distant as it can be from his own will or that of anyone else’s. We already know all of his tics, lines of reasoning and his resigned attitude by heart. Still, he always insists on being tested. But when we put him to work using a typewriter, the letter always turns out poorly and then he responds to the few questions asked of him with a
peaceful silence. I can’t imagine what he lives on. He seems clean and miserable at the same time. He seems to be inexorably convinced of his failings; he doesn’t envisage the least possibility of being successful, yet he accepts the obligation of being stubborn and cares little about the numerous shattering rejections he must face. I couldn’t say whether the spectacle was pathetic, repugnant or sublime, but I think I will never be able to forget the look on his face (serene? resentful?) with which he always receives the poor results of his test and the semi-reverence with which he says goodbye. Occasionally, I have seen him on the streets, walking slowly or simply observing the river of people who walk by and who perhaps might