we say, which often ends up being a one-off – just as she might have gone up to the apartment of some other man she fancied, but that I was, how can I put it, ‘taken’ by his friend, at least for the time being, which, as it turned out, was almost the case. Not that this bothered him: he didn’t for a moment moderate his appraising masculine gaze or his salacious, flirtatious, gummy smile, as if unexpectedly seeing a woman in bra and skirt and making her acquaintance was, for him, an investment for the near future and brought with it the hope of meeting me again very soon, alone and in another place, or even asking for my phone number later on from the person who had been obliged, against his will, to introduce us.
‘I’m really sorry about that,’ I said, when I returned to the living room, this time wearing my sweater. ‘I wouldn’t have appeared in that state if I’d known we weren’t alone.’ I understood that I needed to emphasize this in order to dispel any suspicions. Díaz-Varela was still regarding me seriously, almost reprovingly or harshly; not so Ruibérriz.
‘There’s absolutely no need to apologize,’ he said with old-fashioned gallantry. ‘Your attire could not have been more striking. Sadly all too fleeting.’
Díaz-Varela scowled, he was distinctly unamused by everything that had happened: the arrival of his accomplice and the news he had brought with him, my irruption on to the scene and the fact that Ruibérriz and I now knew each other, plus the possibility that I might have heard them through the door, when he thought I was safely asleep; he was doubtless equally displeased by the way Ruibérriz had gazed so covetously at my bra and skirt, or at the little they concealed, and by his subsequent compliments, even though these had been couched in the politest of terms. I felt a childish and, after what I had just discovered, incongruous pleasure – it lasted only an instant – in imagining that Díaz-Varela could feel something resembling or, rather, reminiscent of jealousy in my regard. He was visibly put out and even more so when we were left alone, once Ruibérriz had departed, his coat draped over his shoulders, as he walked slowly towards the lift, as if he were very pleased with his own image and wanted to give me time to admire him from behind: he was clearly an optimist, of the kind who doesn’t believe that he’ll ever get old. Before entering the lift, he turned to us, for we were watching him from the front door like a married couple, and he bade farewell by raising a hand to one eyebrow for a second, then raising it slightly higher in a gesture that mimicked doffing a hat. The problem he had brought with him seemed to have vanished, he was obviously a frivolous man whose anxieties were easily displaced by whatever cheering moment the present might bring him. It occurred to me that he would not do as his friend had asked and destroy his leather coat; he was too pleased with the way he looked in it.
‘Who’s he?’ I asked Díaz-Varela, trying to use an indifferent, casual tone of voice. ‘What does he do? He’s the first friend of yours I’ve met, and you seem an unlikely pair. He strikes me as a bit of an oddball.’
‘He’s Ruibérriz,’ he replied tartly, as if that were an entirely new fact or a defining piece of information. Then he realized that he had been rather sharp with me and hadn’t told me anything. He remained silent for a few moments, as if weighing up how much he could say without compromising himself. ‘You met Rico on one occasion,’ he said. ‘Anyway, as for Ruibérriz, he does all kinds of things and nothing in particular. He’s not a friend, I only know him superficially, although I’ve known him for a while now. He has various vague business deals going on, none of which make him very much money, which is why he has his fingers in all kinds of different pies. If he wins the heart of some wealthy woman, he lives off her for a while until she gets fed up with him. Otherwise, he writes television scripts and speeches for ministers, company directors, bankers or whoever, and does some ghostwriting too. He carries out research for punctilious historical novelists: what did people wear in the nineteenth century or in