this explanation, with an accompanying oblique glance, at Luisa and at me, to whom he had not yet been introduced, ‘and I suddenly realize that I have no idea why I came out. Or I go into Barcelona and, once there, I can’t for the life of me remember the reason for my trip. Then I stand still for a while – I don’t wander around or pace up and down – until I can recall the purpose of my visit. Anyway, even on those occasions, I could not be said to be “hanging around”, indeed, I am one of the few people capable of standing in the street motionless and bewildered without actually giving that impression. Rather, the impression I give is of being very focused, let’s say, on the verge of making some crucial discovery or of putting the finishing touches in my head to a complicated sonnet. If some acquaintance spots me in these circumstances, he would never venture to say so much as a “Hello”, even though I’m standing alone, stock-still in the middle of the pavement (I never lean against the wall, that would look as if I’d been stood up), for fear of interrupting some demanding line of reasoning or a moment of deep meditation. Nor am I ever at risk of being mugged, because my stern, absorbed appearance dissuades all malefactors. They can tell I am a man whose intellectual faculties are on full alert and fully functioning (or “working flat out”, to use a more colloquial expression), and they wouldn’t dare pick a fight with me. They can see that it would prove dangerous to them, that I would react with a rare violence and speed. I rest my case.’
Luisa couldn’t help but laugh, and nor, I believe, could I. The fact that she could switch so rapidly from being immersed in the anxious thoughts she had been telling me about to being amused by someone she had only just met made me think again that she had an enormous capacity for enjoyment and – how can I put it – for being ordinarily and momentarily happy. Some people are like that, not many, it’s true, people who grow impatient and bored with unhappiness and in whom it rarely lasts very long, even though, for a while, it could be said to have taken a terrible toll on them. From what I had seen of him, Desvern must have been the same, and it occurred to me that had Luisa been the one to die and he the one to survive, it was likely that he would have had a similar reaction to his wife’s now. (‘If he were still alive and a widower, I would not be here,’ I thought.) Yes, there are people who cannot bear misfortune. Not because they’re frivolous or empty-headed. They’re not, of course, immune to grief, and they doubtless experience grief as intensely as anyone else. But they’re designed to shake it off more quickly and without too much difficulty, as if they were simply incompatible with such states of mind. It’s in their nature to be light-hearted and cheerful and they see no particular prestige in suffering, unlike most of the rest of boring humanity, and our own nature always catches up with us, because almost nothing can break or distort it. Maybe Luisa was a simple mechanism: she cried when something made her cry and laughed when something made her laugh, and one emotion could follow seamlessly on from the other, she was simply responding to a stimulus. Not that simplicity is necessarily at odds with intelligence. I knew she was intelligent. Her lack of malice and her ready laughter did not diminish that fact in the slightest, for these are things that depend not on intelligence, but on character, which belongs in another category and another sphere.
Professor Rico was wearing a charming Nazi-green jacket and an ivory-coloured shirt; his nonchalantly knotted tie was a brighter, more luminous green – melon green perhaps. He was extremely well coordinated without, however, seeming to have put much thought into that excellent combination of colours, apart from the clover-green handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, which was, perhaps, a green too far.
‘But I thought you were mugged once, Professor, here in Madrid,’ protested the man called Díaz-Varela. ‘It was years ago now, but I remember it well. In the Gran Vía, it was, after you’d drawn some money from a cashpoint, isn’t that right?’