Was Raúl tortured badly, I asked Jorge. He said that he did not know, that he had not asked too many questions. Elena had told him all of this the previous evening without any prompting. The Chileans had nothing to lose by going on the march, he said, but for us it would be different. Something that seemed entirely innocent could ruin your life, he said. Elena had said that Raúl was not very political; she thought the army had made a mistake when they took him in. He wanted to go home, she had said, but that was now impossible because he had given evidence against the regime.

The following day was the Sunday of the march and Jorge woke me early and said that if we left now, we could catch the train to Gerona and spend the day there. We were careful not to use the bathroom in case we woke any of the Chileans. We left the pensión as quietly as we could, as though we were absconding without paying the rent. I slept on the train and walked around museums and churches for the rest of the day in a sort of daze. We sat in a bar in the square beside the river and drank beer and ordered tapas and read the newspapers until about four o’clock, and then we walked back to the railway station and took the train to Barcelona. We went to a movie in one of the modern cinemas on Paseo de Gracia, and we did not arrive back at the pensión until about ten thirty. We were hungry and we went to a cheap restaurant with Elena and María José and the dark-skinned boy, Enrique. They were high from the demonstration, full of stories about the police with riot shields and rubber-bullet guns watching as the crowd taunted them for being fascists. Elena thought that they had orders not to charge the crowd, but it must have been hard for them. There were all sorts of people on the march—Catalan nationalists, socialists, trade union people, communists, just ordinary people. She was really sure that the government would have to have free elections now.

I was waiting for them to ask us where we had been, but in the excitement and flow of their talk, and in the way we listened as though we were interested in how the demonstration had gone, they never noticed that we had escaped for the day. Elena asked us if we had been on the march and Jorge said no, because we did not know who to march with; instead, we had watched the march, he said, looking out for our friends, but we had not seen them. She nodded and smiled.