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extreme respect and veneration (until I turned thirty), I managed, gradually, subtly, to persuade her not only to have sex at odd times and in unsuitable places (’I bet Gualta is never this daring,’ I thought one night as we lay together, in some haste, on the roof of a newspaper kiosk in Calle Principe de Vergara), but also to engage in sexual deviations that only months before, in the unlikely event of our ever actually having heard of them (through someone else, of course), we would have described as humiliating or even as sexual atrocities. We committed unnatural acts, that beautiful woman and I.
    After three months, I awaited with impatience my next encounter with Gualta, confident that now he would be very different from me. However, the occasion did not arise and, finally, one weekend, I decided to go to Barcelona myself with the intention of watching his house in order to discover, albeit from afar, any possible changes in his person or in his personality. Or, rather, to confirm the efficacy of the alterations I had made to myself.
    For eighteen hours (spread over Saturday and Sunday) I took refuge in a café from which I could watch Gualta’s building and wait for him to come out. He did not appear, however, and, just when I was wondering whether I should return defeated to Madrid or go up to his apartment, even if I risked possibly bumping into him, I suddenly saw his nonentity of a wife come out of the front door. She was rather carelessly dressed, as if her spouse’s success were no longer sufficient to embellish her artificially or as if its effect did not extend to weekends. On the other hand, though, it seemed to me, as she walked past the darkened glass concealing me, that she was somehow more provocative than the woman I had seen at the supper in Madrid and at the party in Barcelona. The reason was very simple and it was enough to make me realise that I had not been as original as I thought nor had the measures I’d taken been wise: the look on her face was that of a salacious, sexually dissolute woman. Though very different, she had the same slight (and very attractive) squint, the same troubling, clouded gaze as my own stunner of a wife.
    I returned to Madrid convinced that the reason Gualta had not left his apartment all weekend was because that same weekend he had travelled to Madrid and had spent hours sitting in La Orotava, the café opposite our building, waiting for me to leave, which I had not done because I was in Barcelona watching his house which he had not left because he was in Madrid watching mine. There was no escape.
    I made a few further, but by now rather half-hearted, attempts. Minor details to complete the transformation: like becoming an official supporter of Real Madrid, in the belief that no supporter of Espanol would ever be allowed into Barça; or else I would order anisette or aniseed liqueur—drinks I find repugnant—in some dingy bar on the outskirts, sure that a man of Gualta’s refined tastes would not be prepared to make such sacrifices; I also started insulting the Pope in public, certain that my rival, a fervent Catholic, would never go that far. In fact, I wasn’t sure of anything and I think that now I never will be. A year and a half after I first met Gualta, my fast-track career in the company for which I still work has come to an abrupt halt, and I expect to be fired (with severance pay, of course) any day now. A little while ago, without any explanation, my wife left me, either because she had grown weary of perversion or else, on the contrary, because my fantasies no longer sufficed and she needed to go in search of fresh dissipations. Will Gualta’s nonentity of a wife have done the same? Is his position in the company as precarious as mine? I will never know, because I prefer not to.
    For the moment has arrived when, if I did arrange to meet Gualta, two things could happen, both equally terrifying, or at least, more terrifying than uncertainty: I could