how much our routines resent change, even when those changes are for the best, which this was not. I found it harder to face my various jobs, to have to watch my boss preening himself and to be on the receiving end of the unbelievably tedious calls or visits from writers, which, for some reason, had become one of my designated tasks, perhaps because I tended to take more interest in them than did my colleagues, who openly avoided them, especially, on the one hand, the more conceited and demanding among them and, on the other, the more tedious and disoriented variety, those who lived alone, the complete disaster areas, the inappropriately flirtatious, the ones who used any excuse to phone us up as a way of starting their day and letting someone know that they still existed. Writers are, for the most part, strange individuals. They get up in exactly the same state of mind as when they went to bed, thinking about their imaginary things, which, despite being purely imaginary, take up most of their time. Those who earn their living from literature and related activities and who, therefore, have no proper job – and there are quite a few of them, because, contrary to what most people say, there’s money to be made in this business, although mainly by the publishers and the distributors – rarely leave their houses and so all they have to do is go back to their computer or their typewriter – a few madmen still continue to use these, which means that their typewritten texts, once delivered, have to be scanned – with an incomprehensible degree of self-discipline: you have to be slightly abnormal to sit down and work on something without being told to. And so I was neither in the mood nor feeling sufficiently patient to give my almost daily advice on what to wear to a novelist called Cortezo, who would call me up on the flimsiest excuse and then say: ‘While I’ve got you on the phone,’ and ask my advice on the collection of hideous old tat he was wearing or thinking of wearing, and which he would then describe to me:
‘Do you think a pair of argyle socks would go with these fine-pinstripe trousers and a pair of brown tasselled moccasins?’
I refrained from saying that I had a horror of argyle socks, fine-pinstripe trousers and brown tasselled moccasins, because that would have worried him no end and the conversation would have gone on and on.
‘What colour are the argyle socks?’ I asked.
‘Brown and orange, but I’ve got them in red and blue and in green and beige too. What do you reckon?’
‘Brown and blue would be best, isn’t that what you said you’ve got on?’ I replied.
‘No, I haven’t got that particular combination. Do you think I should go out and buy a pair?
I felt the tiniest bit sorry for him, although it irritated me intensely that he should ask me these things as if I were his widow-to-be or his mother, and the guy was so vain about his writing, which the critics loved, but which I found just plain silly. Anyway, I didn’t want to send him off into the city in search of yet more ignominious socks, which, besides, would not solve his problem.
‘No, it’s not worth it, Cortezo. Why don’t you cut the blue diamonds from one pair of socks and the brown ones from another and stitch them together? You can make a “patchwork”, as we say in Spanish now. A patchwork work of art.’
He took a while to realize that I was joking.
‘But I wouldn’t know how to do that, María, I can’t even sew on a button, and I have to be at my appointment in an hour and a half. Ah, I get it, you’re pulling my leg.’
‘Me?! Not at all. But you’d be better off with some plain socks, navy blue if you’ve got any, and in that case, black shoes would go best.’ I did usually help him out in the end, insofar as I could.
Now that I was in a far less sanguine mood, however, I would rather irritably fob him off with some vaguely ill-intentioned ‘advice’. If he told me that he was going to a cocktail party at the French Embassy wearing a dark grey suit, I would unhesitatingly recommend a pair of Nile-green socks, assuring him that these were all the rage and that everyone there would be amazed, which wasn’t so