He cannot let any of us get too close to him, she said, and yet he needs us to be around, and we all understand that. He knows that he will never be all right, not just physically, not just about dreams and memories, but that he will never be able to trust anyone very much, and he feels guilty, and I think he feels shock. He remembers the days and weeks of fear, but then the actual torture seems to be something he cannot recover from. Soon, we’re all going to go our own way, but none of us knows what to do about him. I think that he will go back to Sweden, and he will always need a group of people who know how to deal with him. We all love him, of course. I don’t know what we are going to do.

ELENA AND I walked back through the Gothic quarter after she had told me this. We were both hungry; we went into a Chinese restaurant on Calle Fernando. We agreed that I would not tell Raúl that I knew his story.

Jorge and María José came back to the pensión four days before we were due to leave. I found him lying on the bed when I came in from the cinema with Elena, Raúl, and the others. He said that he had some spare money and he had asked the landlady if I could have a separate room. He had done a deal with her. María José, he said, was going to move into the room with him. He hoped that was all right. I said that it was fine and began to put things into my bag. No, not tonight, he said, in the morning, that’s when the room is free. I lay on the bed and asked him where he had been. They had gone to Madrid, he said, and they had loved it there, it was much livelier than Barcelona. And did anything happen here while we were away, he asked. No, I said, nothing.

Jorge and María José avoided us over the next few days. I saw them holding hands in the street. Raúl asked me if I knew about what had happened to him in Chile. I hesitated and then I said that I did. He said that sometimes he wished no one knew, and other times he wanted everyone to know. I can’t decide, he said, maybe that’s the best way. Maybe as the years go by I will forget about it. I nodded, but I did not think he would.

Jorge came to my room on the last morning, and said he wanted to make something clear. We were leaving, he said, and they would want to know our addresses. He was going to give them a wrong address and he thought that I should do the same. It might sound stupid, he said, but they could go back to Chile or come to Argentina, and they could be arrested again, and our names and addresses could be found on them, and that could mean real trouble with the way things are at the moment. Don’t be so stupid, I said. I told him he was an asshole. He walked out of the room.