“You love these places,” comes Gerardo’s voice from the back of the room, and it’s only then that I perceive the smell of hash in the air and the putrid damp.

It’s him, I think, but it could also have been Shorty, who is now crouched down between the faux leather couches, stalking some prey.

We go back to the bedroom, where my cellphone is also spying on me with its silence. I switch it on.

“Are you expecting a call?” asks Gerardo.

His voice is unsteady; he breathes as if he’s suffocating.

“No.”

“Why did you turn off your phone?”

“To save the battery.”

“You told me that you’d broken up with him. That you don’t even call each other now.”

“Sorry,” I mumble.

I grab my toothbrush and go to the bathroom, worrying about my phone, in spite of having erased the compromising messages. When I return, it’s sitting where I left it, but I continue to feel anxious until Gerardo goes to the bathroom and I can check that there isn’t, in fact, anything on it to give me away.

I sit on the bed—the grubby blanket covered in hairs—and wait. He reappears with a damp toiletry bag. His air of efficiency has vanished. He picks up my phone. Checks it compulsively. I watch the missed calls scroll past, the outgoing calls, the messages. I’m getting annoyed. He puts the phone on the nightstand and looks ashamed.

“You should change your password. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“Sorry,” he repeats.

He lies down, puts on his headphones, and smokes. I undress and get between the sheets.

“Switch off the light,” I say.

I calculate that it must be about two. I’m not sleepy. I try to work out a strategy for leaving him, for walking out on him in the morning, or maybe on Sunday, when we’re back in Madrid, to say that it’s over, that I’ve had enough, and that I only came on this trip to put an end to it all because there’s no point going on…but I can’t. Gerardo’s angst is pasted onto my body, it immobilizes me.