“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Jesusa intoned, visibly excited.

Before Alicia could reply, Jesusa caught her in one of her boa-constrictor embraces and riddled her face with kisses that smelled of aniseed. “Let’s have a good look at you,” said the caretaker as she freed her.

Alicia smiled. “Don’t tell me I’m too thin.”

“Men might say that, and for once they’d be right.”

“You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you, Jesusa.”

“You shameless flatterer. Let me give you another kiss that you don’t deserve. All that time goodness knows where, without coming, or calling, or writing, or anything at all . . .”

Jesusa Labordeta was one of those war widows with enough spirit and determination for nine lives she had never been able to live—and never would. For fifteen years she’d been working as a caretaker in the building. She occupied a tiny apartment with two rooms at the far end of the entrance hall, which she shared with a radio tuned to a station featuring romantic soaps, and a half-dead dog she’d rescued from the street. She’d christened the mutt Napoleon, even though he could barely capture the street corner in time to perform his early-morning urinary duties, and often ended up dropping his load under the row of mailboxes in the hall. She complemented her miserable wages by mending and sewing up old clothes for half the neighborhood. Loose tongues—and most tongues were loose in those days—liked to say that Jesusa was as fond of anise liqueur as of tight-trousered sailors, and that sometimes, when she went overboard with the bottle, she could be heard weeping in her minute home while poor Napoleon howled with fear.

“Come on in, it’s fiendishly cold out here.”

Alicia followed her indoors.

“Señor Leandro called this morning to let me know you were coming.”

“Always so thoughtful, Señor Leandro.”

“He’s a gentleman,” declared Jesusa, who had always put him on a pedestal. “He speaks so well and lovely . . .”

The building had no elevator, and the stairs seemed to have been put in by the architect as a deterrent. Jesusa walked ahead, and Alicia followed her as best she could, dragging her case step by step.

“I’ve aired the apartment and tidied the place up a bit, ’cause it really needed it. Fernandito helped me—I hope you don’t mind. As soon as he heard you were coming, he didn’t stop pestering me until I allowed him to make himself useful . . .”

Fernandito was Señora Jesusa’s nephew. A blameless soul of whom even a saint could take advantage, he was dangerously prone to the classic attacks of adolescent infatuation. To spice it all up, Mother Nature had enjoyed herself endowing him with the looks of a bumpkin. He lived with his mother in the next building and worked for a grocer’s as a delivery boy, although the bulk of his toils and talents was devoted to the composition of elaborate amorous verse dedicated to Alicia, in whom he saw an irresistible mixture of the Lady of the Camellias and the wicked queen in Snow White, only racier. Shortly before Alicia left Barcelona, three years earlier, Fernandito had declared his eternal love to her, his readiness to provide her with at least five offspring, God willing, and the promise that his body, soul, and other earthly belongings would always be hers, in exchange for a farewell kiss.