Last night I met a young guy in a bar who was identical to Proust. Identical. I couldn’t think of a good excuse to take a photo, but I chatted to him. He had a black eye. He said he’d been beaten up buying cocaine in the Doctores neighbourhood. Someone tried to mug him as he was leaving the building, and he wouldn’t hand over his wallet and phone. ‘I wasn’t giving that stupid kid anything, and the fucker smacked me one because I didn’t,’ said the twenty-four-year-old Mexican Proust with the black eye. A sociology student at the university, from a family in which everyone has read Marx. ‘Even my granddad’s read Marx. So have I, obviously, but that’s not the most hardcore thing I’ve ever done. You want to know what the most hardcore thing I’ve ever done is? Something I’m really fucking proud of. I read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. All seven of the bastards, from start to finish. And you know what? Proust’s the fucking man. A total dude. Every character, even the seriously unimportant ones, turns up again later in the books. And all of them, every single one of the fuckers, has a past, a family and a shitload of stories. Over the seven volumes you get millions of these endless scenes, packed with sentimental details. He’s seriously sentimental, I’m telling you. All those characters are seriously sentimental. And just think, the whole crew from all seven volumes wouldn’t even fit into this bar, let alone a club. There’s fucking millions of them, I’m telling you. And another thing, they all have their dramas, their purpose, their part to play, they’re not just hanging about for no reason. Plus the guy spends an insane number of pages on everything. He’ll go on for fifty pages about any old crap. Proust, man, I’m telling you. He’s a fucking dude.’

We chatted at the bar. Julia saw someone she knew and went to sit at their table. Proust’s friends got bored by the conversation and went out to smoke. In the toilets, heady with the alcohol and the hallucination, I wondered if there’d ever been another young guy who looked so much like Proust. We swapped numbers. He said he was having a barbecue on his balcony the next weekend, that he lived with two friends he was sure I’d get on with – one girl who’s a tattoo artist and another who’s a poet from Chiapas – and that he wanted to invite me to the barbecue so we could talk more, because they, the people he was with, wanted to go to a party in the Narvarte neighbourhood. I kept his number and his name: Proust, twenty-four years old.