Zoe was the proofreader who knew the most about everything. She could rattle off whole passages of Manuel Seco’s works on lexicography and the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas. On her right was the second proofreader, María Isabel, an overweight brunette whose wardrobe generated images of Sunday mornings in some parish church in the Estrella neighborhood. She also read romantic fiction. The two women spent their working days correcting the galleys of books by retired philosophy professors of the Complutense or Autónima universities or poets who wrote about depression and nostalgia under the holm oaks of their native soils. On their journey home on the metro they read their romantic novels. Zoe was spectacularly good at catching mistakes. “If I have time before going to bed,” she’d say, “I write to the publishers to point out the errors.” María Isabel was slow and clumsy, and wore a permanently offended expression. She was the one who found cause for complaint about the new Excel-sheet filler. “The boy that was here before you was such fun,” she said one day. “He used to tell us stories about his girlfriends and we’d give him advice.” She smiled politely. The message was that Zoe and María Isabel found her boring: she never told them anything. She entered the office in silence and left without offering more than answers to work-related questions. Her opinion of the proofreaders must have shown on her face and in her habit of avoiding contact. Things were different with the office manager. She was the only employee to have a golden parachute; she didn’t read romantic fiction, probably didn’t read anything else either. She was tall, with short hair and a seductive, slightly masculine voice, and she dressed like a nun. Sometimes she was tempted to ask the office manager if she belonged to the Teresian Association, but was afraid of offending her. Her name was Paz, and she wasn’t annoyed when María Isabel denounced her. “Denounced” is probably a slight exaggeration: “ratted her out” would be better. María Isabel had told Paz that she was putting down three hundred euros on her monthly time sheets. “That new girl is taking us for a ride,” she could imagine María Isabel having said to Paz and the boss before she arrived at the office. When she switched on her computer, María Isabel came over to her table and said:

“Your time sheets are wrong. You’ve been writing down three hundred euros a month when your pay is only two hundred. That’s more per hour than I earn.”