We’re having beers on the balcony of room 401. We’re a bit drunk, and meanwhile one girl is sipping fizzy grapefruit juice with no ice. She talks about the thesis she’s writing. She mentions Alberich. I move closer, trying to be casual, and hear: ‘a chapter on Alberich the dwarf, the one who guards the Nibelung treasure under the water’.

This morning, in the hotel restaurant, a waitress was humming that Shakira song, the one I think of as a kind of Post-it. That reminder, always so timely. Hearing it put me in a good mood.

From the whole afternoon at the conference, I have three sad postcards. A poet with a centre parting and limp eyelashes blinks slowly, putting on a deep voice to read one of his recent poems. A charmless fiction-writer who reveals his insecurities – that feverish pursuit of acceptance – with everything he says. And Robin syndrome: someone always wanting to be next to Batman (the acclaimed writer or the festival organiser or the superstar publisher).

I asked Jonás over the phone if he thinks poets in all languages put on a different voice when they read their poems out loud. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but it reminds me of that poem you showed me once, by the poet who made lines, zigzags, waves. There are some poems you can’t read out loud, my love, and those ones are the most like certain conclusions of physics. The points where poetry and science meet. Science often reaches Dadaist conclusions, you know. Poetry and science at those twin points can’t be read out loud.’

There are various signs in the hotel foyer. One of them says it’s forbidden to enter with balloons. No smoking, no pets, no inflated balloons. A friend points that sign out to me, puzzled. ‘It’s not what you think,’ says one of the organisers. ‘If a balloon bursts in here, we all fall to the floor thinking there’s a shootout.’

Drinking beer on the same balcony, with the good news that someone’s got hold of some mezcal and plastic cups. We’d all been at a terrible reading, of a terrible book. Someone produces the book. Another person reads passages out loud, imitating the author’s voice. We revel in the endless stream of sexual metaphors. It’s like the fount of all bad poetry, a great feast of it, or something.

Jonás has gone to Lisbon with his sister, and their father has stayed in Spain with a cousin of their mother. This morning I got a text message: ‘Luckily we ran into your granddad, he says what are you on about, you’re wrong, the bookshop you recommended isn’t there any more. He took us to eat those famous custard tarts, which were really good, by the way.’