meetings in his apartment, in one or two of its rooms, what did any of the rest matter to me, his comings and goings, his past, his friendships, his plans, his entourage, his whole life, I wasn’t part of that, nor would I be ‘hereafter’, henceforth or later on, our days were numbered and that final number was never far away. And yet, although this was all true in essence, it wasn’t absolutely true: I had felt curious, I had woken up when I heard a key word – perhaps ‘bird’ or ‘know’ or ‘wife’ or probably the combination of all three – I had got up from the bed, pressed my ear to the door, opened it a tiny crack so that I could hear better, I had felt glad when he and Ruibérriz had proved incapable of moderating their voices, of keeping to a whisper, overcome by their own agitation. I started wondering why I had done that, and immediately began to regret it: why did I have to know what I now knew, why did I do it, why was it no longer possible for me to put my arms about his waist and draw him to me, it would have been so easy to remove his hand from my shoulder with that one movement, which would have seemed utterly natural and simple a few minutes before; why could I not force him to embrace me without further delay or hesitation, there were his beloved lips, which, as usual, I wanted to kiss, only I didn’t dare to now, or else there was something about them that simultaneously repelled and attracted me, or the thing that repelled me lay not in his lips – poor, innocent lips – but in him. I still loved him and yet was afraid of him, I still loved him and yet my knowledge of what he had done disgusted me, not him, but that knowledge.
‘You do ask some strange questions,’ I said breezily. ‘How should I know what woke me up, a bad dream, lying in an awkward position, knowing that I could be spending my time with you, I don’t know, what does it matter? And why should I care what that man told you, I didn’t even know he was here. And the reason I put my bra on was because it’s not the same being seen lying down and close to or in short bursts as being seen standing up and walking around the house like a model for Victoria’s Secret, except, of course, that they’re always wearing lingerie. Do I have to explain everything to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
He seemed genuinely bewildered and uncomprehending, and this – this shift in interest, this distraction – gave me a slight, momentary advantage, soon, I thought, he would stop asking me devious questions and then I could leave, I needed to shake off that hand and get out of there. Although my former self, which was still hanging around – it hadn’t yet been substituted or replaced, or cancelled or exiled, that couldn’t possibly happen so very quickly – was in no hurry to leave: each time I left, I never knew when I would return or if I ever would.
‘You men are so dense sometimes,’ I said firmly, for some such clichéd comment seemed to me advisable in order to change the subject and guide the conversation into more vulgar territory, which also tends to be safer and more conducive to confidences and a lowering of guards. – ‘There are certain parts of the female anatomy that we women deem to be past it by the time we’re twenty-five or thirty, let alone ten years later. We compare ourselves with ourselves as we were, remembering each year that passes. And that’s why we prefer not to expose those areas in too unseemly or full-frontal a manner. Well, that’s my view, but there are plenty of women who don’t give a damn, the beaches are packed with brutal, catastrophic displays of flesh, among them women who’ve had a couple of those rock-hard implants put in, thinking that they will solve the problem. Frankly, they set my teeth on edge.’ I laughed briefly at my choice of phrase, and added another: ‘They really give me the creeps.’
‘I see,’ he said and he laughed briefly too, which was a good sign. ‘I wouldn’t say that any parts of your anatomy were past it, they look pretty good to me.’
‘He’s feeling calmer,’ I