“She was already getting a bit Alzheimerish, although I thought at the time it was her liver that was shot—you had to hang on to everything for her, her passport, her wallet, she was always hiding cash in odd places in the hotel room and forgetting it, she couldn’t follow the plots to films anymore. I’d take her to a film in the afternoon and afterwards I’d have to explain it all to her, and by dinner, she’d be saying, Weren’t we going to a film today. And she’d stopped eating real food, you’d take her to these wonderful Basque restaurants, and either she couldn’t take a bite, or she’d suddenly start trying to shovel up the soup with her fingers. But she still had a sweet tooth.”

“What’s a ‘greengrasser’?”

“A what? Oh. A marchand de légumes.”

“Was that what her parents did? My mama always said her family were aristocrats or something.”

“No. Her father was a stockbroker. Neither aristocrat nor greengrocer. There was another family called Kidd, she didn’t exactly discourage the idea we might be related, but I don’t think they were any relation.” He pauses. “It was called the Avenida Veinte-something.”

“What was?”

“The hot-chocolate shop in San Sebastián. I think that’s the most words I’ve ever said at one time in my life! Shall I shut up for a bit?”

They both laugh.

“Not yet.”

He reflects. “That’s what I want for Artemio.” He hesitates. “That’s what I think about for you, when you talk about dropping out of school.”

“What?” She’s completely lost now. “Hot chocolate?”

“A cultivated mind.”

“Putain,” Rat groans.

His eyebrows shoot up, but he smiles and continues, doggedly, “Things you love that are—inside you. Poems you know by heart. Paintings. The sea. You had a brush with death the other day. Imagine you had died—what would you picture as you lay dying? Imagine you were locked up in solitary confinement for years, like those men in the photographs, the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. No MP3, no Internet. No books, even. Torture, humiliation, interrogators trying to destabilize you, make you forget who you are. That’s what my mother tried to give me: a kind of imaginative self-sufficiency.

“You know, the world we live in, Artemio’s going to this superprestigious school where all the other parents look at education as this kind of brand-name chit you cash in fifteen years later for a job in the City. Why else would you be paying ten thousand pounds a year? For me, it’s a way of stocking your mind with things that would keep you from going mad if you were ever sent to Guantánamo Bay. Does that sound very pretentious or self-dramatizing?”