“Hey, Fermín. At this time of night I imagined you’d be pestering the wife,” said Diego. “Short on Sugus?”

“Run out.”

“I’ve got lemon, pineapple, and strawberry.”

“Make it lemon. Five packets.”

“And one on the house.”

Fermín paid, adding a tip. Without counting them, Diego put the coins in a leather pouch that hung from his belt, like a tram conductor. Fermín had never understood how Blind Diego knew whether he was being cheated or not, but he knew. Diego had been born sightless, but he could see them coming. He lived alone in a windowless room in a pensión on Calle Princesa, where his best friend was a transistor radio on which he listened to soccer matches and the news bulletins that amused him so much.

“You’ve come to see the trains, eh?”

“Old habits,” said Fermín.

He watched Diego set off toward the room where not even bedbugs were waiting for him, and he thought of Bernarda, asleep in their bed and smelling of rose water. He was about to go back home but decided to step into the great nave of the station, that cathedral of steam and iron through which he’d returned to Barcelona one distant night in 1941. Fermín had always thought that destiny, though keen to ambush innocent people from behind and if possible with their pants down, also enjoyed nesting in railway stations whenever it took a refreshment break. This is where tragedies and romances began and ended, as did escapes and returns, betrayals and absences. Life, some said, is a railway station where one almost always enters, or gets put into, the wrong carriage.

Those thoughts, no deeper than a cup of coffee, usually came to Fermín in the small hours of the night, when his body was tired of tossing and turning but his head kept on spinning like a top. Determined to swap his cheap philosophy for the austere comfort of a wooden bench, he walked under the station’s curved vault. A design, he thought, with a clear message from its shrewd architect to the fresh arrivals: that the future is born crooked in Barcelona.

Fermín settled on the bench, unwrapped a Sugus, and popped it in his mouth. Absorbed in his sweet nirvana, he became mesmerized by the railway lines, which seemed to draw together as they vanished into the night. After a while he felt the ground shaking under his feet and saw the headlights of a locomotive breaking the shroud of midnight. A couple of minutes later the train entered the station, riding on a cloud of steam.

A blanket of sea mist swept in over the platforms, eerily enveloping the passengers as they alighted after their long journey. Happy faces were in short supply. Fermín watched them as they passed, taking in their weary expressions and smart clothes, fantasizing on prior incidents and circumstances that had brought them to the city. He was starting to relish his new role as an instant biographer of anonymous citizens when he saw her.