I liked the idea of the airplane traveling across the world through the night. I said to myself that there were no mothers on airplanes. I thought that maybe I would sleep through the night, and I hoped that Jorge planned to sleep too. I saw him arriving in the departures section of the airport with his parents. His mother seemed even more involved in the details of his journey than mine. His father looked around the airport as though he were considering whether he was going to buy it or not. His father said that we would be the tallest boys in Barcelona. He was there years ago, he said, and in Madrid and Seville, and he was the tallest person he met. They were small, all of them, he said. Franco was a tiny little fellow, he said. And he supposed that the new king was small as well. The food is terrible there, he said, that is why they are all so small. Jorge and his mother laughed. I smiled. I wished his parents would leave us now, so that we could check in and wait for the plane without having to listen to his father. I wondered what my father would be like if he had come to the airport with me. He would be older, much older. I saw him now as a gaunt and faded presence, almost here now, standing close to me. I looked at Jorge’s parents: they were so confident of their place in the world, they smiled with such ease. I could not imagine how it would be to have parents like that.

I sat by the window, and we agreed that we would change places as the night wore on, but Jorge liked being in the middle beside a Spanish girl who was going home after a visit to her uncle and aunt. Her parents had phoned to say that there had been huge marches and riots in Barcelona, she said. I fell asleep after the meal and when I woke the lights had been turned on, and there was an announcement that we would be landing in half an hour. When I pulled up the blind on the window, I discovered it was bright; there was a raw blueness on the horizon and we were sailing through freshly washed clouds. The Spanish girl told us that we could get a bus from the airport into Plaza de España, and from there we could get a metro or a taxi to our pensión.

I do not know what I expected the city to look like: maybe I thought that the buildings would be old and painted white, but the part we drove through that morning looked like Buenos Aires, except it was untidier and busier. We passed by a busload of police; some police were sitting in the bus and others were standing on the street holding rifles and what we thought were rubber-bullet guns. Jorge nudged me in the back of the taxi and we both looked out at them. In Buenos Aires when you saw police like that, it meant that there would be trouble, a raid on an apartment, or an office. But here the police seemed to be just standing there, looking around them.