I wonder if Jonás has slept with anyone. Is a French girl removing her hairband even as I write and placing it by Jonás’ watch? Or is a Spanish girl sitting in bed beside him, lighting a post-coital cigarette? I’d better stop, this is making me horribly anxious. I like questions, but not all of them.

The old watch, the wind-up watch his father gave him. The watch that belonged to his grandfather, his father’s father. Jonás takes it off every night before going to sleep. I miss the presence of that watch on the nightstand.

I saw Carolina, whose belly is getting bigger and bigger. Julia called from Canada, she’s at a film festival. She’s happy because she bought a new guitar after a meeting. Tania called to say that books with tiny print make her feel like she’s on a treadmill, wearing jogging bottoms, and getting nowhere. ‘It’s awful, you just don’t move.’ Julia said she desperately needed to come home, to have a drink and a chat. Carolina said Lila was very fidgety this afternoon, but I didn’t get to feel her kicking.

I had lunch with Philippe and Luis Felipe. I realised Philippe is responsible for Vila-Matas encountering Emmanuel Bove. This means he’s also responsible for my spending all this time hunting for a copy of My Friends, which Vila-Matas mentions in his book dedicated to Robert Walser, one of my favourite writers. Oh, it’s wonderful when one book leads you to another. A novel I’ve been trying to track down for ages, like a kind of savage detective. In the university library there was a copy of another book by Bove. ‘It’s his last novel, but I prefer Mes amis, the first one,’ said Philippe. I have Bove’s last novel photocopied on my bookshelf, a kind of adopted sibling to its out-of-print brothers and sisters.