When we arrived back at the pensión, we met the three girls, who had just returned from the cinema. They were talking about a demonstration the following Sunday. The slogan, they said, was Amnesty, Freedom, and Autonomy. It would be led by Catalan activists, but anyone else who wanted could march. Everyone thought that it was going to be the biggest march since the death of Franco, Elena said. They were all going to go, and they thought, they said, that we might come with them. Jorge nodded and said that it sounded like a good idea. At the first big march, Elena said, there had been a baton charge, but the most recent ones had been peaceful.

As soon as we closed the door of our room, Jorge said that we would have to be very careful. I did not understand what he meant. We can’t go on any demonstrations, he said. Why not, I asked. I had no idea what he was talking about. It would just take one photographer, he said, or just one shot on television, or just one person watching. And what, I asked. He said he was sure that the embassy was noting who was going on the marches. There’s no embassy in Barcelona, and nobody, in any case, would recognize us, I said. He turned and looked at me sharply as he spoke. Sometimes, he said, you are the most innocent person I have ever met.

That night he told me to turn off the light and pretend to be asleep once more. I think that he liked the idea of my being there in the bed beside his bed, listening to every sound which he and Elena made, the eunuch beside the sexual athlete, witnessing his prowess. I began to view the length of time it took him to come, all that gasping and sweating, as a form of stupidity, but I am sure that I simply felt jealous or useless and my opinion was formed as a result of that. I woke the next morning wishing I was at home in my own bed with the day to myself. Instead, I had to get up and be Jorge’s companion. I did not feel like his companion. We did not discuss the demonstration again, and the Chileans believed that we were going to come with them. I wondered what plans Jorge had to avoid them on the Sunday.

As we walked around the city, and went into a restaurant to have our lunch, he told me that Raúl had been tortured after the coup in Chile. None of the others had been tortured, although two or three of them had been arrested. But the others were in danger because they had been members of the communist party. The priest, he said, was an important member. They had all gone to Sweden first, and their lodgings were being paid by a Swedish organization. Soon, they would decide whether to go back to Stockholm and apply for Swedish citizenship, or stay on in Barcelona, or maybe wait and see if the situation changed in Chile—although this now seemed very unlikely—or maybe go to some other country in South America, or Mexico.