be happening because it’s just too absurd, a stroke of inconceivably bad luck, I won’t even have a chance to tell someone about it, which is the one thing that very slightly makes up for the worst misfortunes, you never know what or who will don the disguise or shape of your unique and individual death, which is always unique even if you depart this world at the same time as many others in some massive catastrophe, but there are usually some warning signs, an inherited disease, an epidemic, a car accident, a plane crash, some bodily organ wearing out, a terrorist attack, a landslide, a derailment, a heart attack, a fire, a violent raid on your house at night, or straying into a dangerous area as soon as you’ve arrived in an, as yet, unexplored city, I’ve found myself in just such places on my travels, especially when I was younger and travelled a lot and took more risks, something could easily have happened to me through my own imprudence or ignorance in Caracas and Buenos Aires, and in Mexico, in New York and in Moscow and in Hamburg and even in Madrid itself, but not right here, yes, perhaps in one of Madrid’s more troubled, downtrodden, darker streets, but not in this bright, quiet, well-heeled area which is more or less my home patch, and which I know like the back of my hand, not while getting out of my car as I have on so many other occasions, why today and not yesterday or tomorrow, why today and why me, it could easily have happened to someone else, even to Pablo, who had already had a far more serious altercation with this man, if only he had made a formal complaint to the police when the brute punched him, I was the one who advised him to drop the matter, what a fool, I felt sorry for this man whose name I don’t even know, but that would have got rid of him, and now that I think of it, I had my warning yesterday, when he shouted at me, and I just shrugged it off and put it out of my mind, I should have been afraid and have acted more cautiously and not entered his territory again for several days or at least until I had ceased to be a target, I shouldn’t have put myself within range of this furious madman who has got it into his head to stick his knife into me again and again, and the knife is sure to be filthy, although that’s hardly important now, it won’t be an infection that carries me off, the point plunging into my body and the blade turning inside are killing me far more quickly, he’s so close to me and he stinks, he can’t have washed in ages, he doesn’t have anywhere to wash, always stuck in his abandoned car, I don’t want to die with that stench in my nostrils, but we don’t get a choice, why does that have to be the last thing to surround me before I say goodbye, that and the now overwhelming smell of the blood, a metallic smell from childhood, which is when one tends to bleed most, it’s my blood, it can’t be anyone else’s, not this madman’s blood, I haven’t wounded him, he’s very strong and very overwrought and there’s no way I could have fought him off, I have no knife to stick in him, whereas he has opened and pierced my skin, my flesh, and my life is flowing out through those wounds, I’m slowly bleeding to death, so many wounds, there’s nothing I can do, so many, he’s done for me.’ And then I, too, thought: ‘But he couldn’t have thought any of that. Or perhaps he could, in very concentrated form.’
‘I’m in no position to give advice to anyone,’ I said to Luisa, ending my prolonged silence, ‘but it seems to me that you really shouldn’t think so much about what went through his head during those moments. After all, they were very brief moments and, in the context of his whole life, almost non-existent; perhaps he didn’t have time to think anything. It doesn’t make sense that, for you, on the other hand, they should have lasted all these months and will perhaps last still longer, what do you gain from that? What does he gain? Nothing. However often you go over and over it in your head,