finish reading the first or seeing the second or listening to the fourth. You only have to glance around the room of the person who has vanished to comprehend how much was interrupted and left hanging, how much becomes, in that instant, unusable and useless; yes, the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that have suddenly become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away, or the special pillow or mattress on which head and body will no longer lie; the glass of water from which he will never take another sip, and the forbidden pack of cigarettes of which only three are left, and the sweets someone bought for him and which no one will dare to finish, as if doing so were an act of theft or profanation; the glasses that will be of no use to anyone and the expectant clothes that will stay hanging in his wardrobe for days or years, until someone gathers enough courage to remove them; the plants that the disappeared person lovingly cared for and watered, and which no one will perhaps want to take on, and the person’s soft fingerprints still there in the skin cream applied each night; someone will doubtless want to inherit and take away the telescope with which the departed used to amuse himself watching the storks nesting on a distant tower, but what they will use it for, who knows, and the window through which he gazed during a pause in his work will be left sightless, with no one to look through it; the diary in which he noted down his appointments and his daily tasks will not move on to the next page, and the last day will lack the final annotation that used to mean: ‘I’ve done what I had to do today.’ All those speaking objects have been left dumb and meaningless, as if a blanket had been thrown over them to silence and soothe them, making them think that night has come, or as if they, too, regretted the loss of their owner and had withdrawn instantaneously, strangely aware that they had become redundant, futile, and were thinking: ‘What will we do here now? We’ll be taken away. We have no master now. All that awaits us is exile or the rubbish bin. Our mission is over.’ Perhaps that is how Desvern’s things had felt months before. Luisa, though, was not a thing. Luisa, therefore, would not have thought that.
I had assumed she meant ‘you’ in the singular, but two people arrived. I heard the voice of the first person, the one she had said hello to, announcing the second person, who was obviously not expected: ‘Hi, I’ve brought Professor Rico with me so as not to leave him hanging around out there in the street. He’s kicking his heels until supper. The restaurant’s somewhere near here and there isn’t time for him to go back to his hotel first. You don’t mind, do you?’ And then he introduced them: ‘Professor Francisco Rico, Luisa Alday.’ ‘Of course I don’t mind, it’s an honour,’ I heard Luisa say. ‘I have another visitor with me, but come in, come in. Would you like a drink?’
I knew Professor Rico’s face well, he often appears on television and in the press, with his wide, expressive mouth, immaculate bald head, which he carries off with great aplomb, his rather large glasses, his casual elegance – slightly English, slightly Italian – his disdainful way of speaking and his half-indolent, half-scathing manner, which is perhaps a way of concealing the underlying melancholia evident in his eyes, as if, already feeling himself to be a man of the past, he hates having to deal with his contemporaries, most of whom are ignorant, trivial individuals, and, at the same time, feels a twinge of anticipatory regret that, one day, he will be obliged to cease dealing with them – dealing with them must also, in a way, be a relief – when his sense that he is a man of the past finally becomes a reality. The first thing he did was to refute what his companion had said:
‘Now look here, Díaz-Varela, I am never to be found “hanging around”, as you put it, even when I find myself out in the street without knowing what to do – quite a frequent occurrence as it happens. I often sally forth in Sant Cugat, where I live,’ and he directed