I had breakfast with Raúl and the priest the next morning. The newspapers included reports about the march with photographs of crowds in the streets. I looked at some of the faces and wondered if those people would be worried now about their future, but I thought not. It all seemed calm and easy. I had tried to think about Raúl being tortured, but I could not. I looked at him now, and realized that the sort of innocence in him which I had been puzzled by was maybe pain and hurt. But still I could not imagine him being tortured, how anyone could want to make him scream out loud or suffer in any way. I tried to put the thought of it out of my mind.

Two nights later Jorge arrived back in the room with María José. It was taken for granted by him that I would leave the communal room in the pensión at a certain point every evening and go to bed. Within half an hour I would turn off the light and pretend to be asleep. If he came to bed alone, then he turned on the light and we talked for a while, or I read a book—I had found a copy of Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul in a Penguin paperback in a bookshop near the Ramblas—while he looked at himself in the mirror and brushed his teeth and took off his clothes, carefully folding them, and pranced around naked for a while before he got into bed. I do not know how he enticed María José into the room. When I left them earlier, Elena and Raúl had been there too. I do not know what he could have said to her. He seemed to have known what he wanted, however, since they both thrashed around the bed, constantly whimpering and gasping, changing position all the time. The cathedral bell had already rung two o’clock in the morning before he entered her. I stayed awake this time until the very end, and I saw her flitting out of the room without making a sound. I asked Jorge if he had enjoyed that, but he lay face down into the pillow and said nothing.

Neither of us appeared for breakfast in the morning. I could not think what to say to Elena, and Jorge did not move in the bed. I had a shower and then quietly dressed myself and slipped out and caught a metro to a stop three stations away. I did not want to bump into anyone I knew. There was a café just beyond the station. I had bought a newspaper but I barely glanced at it. I ordered coffee and a croissant and let time go by and looked at people who came in and out. I wanted to go home. I realized that we had another week to go. I walked back down through the city to the pensión.