I slept through some of the film and left before it was over. I waited outside for them and we went back to the pensión. We agreed to meet again at nine o’clock. In the meantime, we would go and lie down. I waited for a while in my room and then I went to the metro station and took a metro to four or five stops up the line. Once more, I found a café and sat on my own drinking coffee. Later, I went back to the pensión and had a shower and tried to sleep. As I passed Raúl’s room on the corridor, I thought of him lying there asleep, his eyes closed, his face in repose. I would have loved to touch him or stand over him and watch him.

I met Elena as arranged at nine o’clock. No one else was coming out, she said, they were all too hung over. I said that I wanted a beer, she agreed to have one too, and we went to a bar off the Ramblas. And then we walked to the cathedral and strolled around the strange, dark streets of the Gothic quarter until we found a ledge we could sit on. She asked me when I thought Jorge was coming back. I shrugged. I did not know. I asked her if she minded him going off with her friend like that. She said that under normal circumstances she would mind, but not here and now. She had learned not to mind things.

She asked me if I understood what was happening and I said that I did not. They had all been in Sweden, she said, and had gone through weeks and weeks of group therapy. They knew a lot about each other, and soon they would all have to make decisions about where they would live. The Swedes were paying for them, but soon that money would come to an end. Some of them were contemplating going back to Chile, but others could not do that. It was a decision, in the end, she said, between Spain and Sweden. They knew that they would have to settle somewhere, make a decision to stay so they would not spend much longer—it had already been more than three years—stateless, homeless, unsure about the future. In the dynamic which develops between people who are rootless and afraid to hope, she said, your friend will want to sleep with the man you have been sleeping with, and you will watch it happen and let it happen, almost want it to happen, you start to will her to behave as badly as she can so that you can feel good.