Elena and Raúl wanted to accompany me to the airport while María José wanted to go separately with Jorge. I brought Elena for coffee and said it might be better if we could say goodbye here. I gave her my address and she gave me a contact number in Sweden. I did not think that she would write to me or think about me very much. It was Jorge she would remember; it was Jorge they would all remember. Jorge and María José were going to get a taxi to Plaza de España and a bus to the airport from there. I said that I would see them there. Elena and Raúl came with me to the metro. Raúl carried my bag. I think that they enjoyed having a last coffee with me and seeing me off. It was something normal and everyday; their lives did not depend on it. I hugged them both and waved goodbye as I went through the turnstile.

WHEN I CAME back from Spain, my mother had changed. It was as though she had waited until I was gone and she had time on her own and free, clear space so that she could age and look worn without a witness to observe the process. She was only in her mid-sixties, but she looked like an old lady. Going to work was difficult. She realized that everything was over and there would be nothing. I think that she made no decisions, that everything she did all her life was done using instinct and whim. She became more involved in the hotel; the guests seemed to love her. She was always punctual and well dressed; her typing was perfect and she remembered everyone’s name. And some of the time, when she had the energy, she paid attention to me. On the weekends, on Friday or Saturday evenings, or at Sunday lunchtime, she cooked a large and elaborate meal, and she took time over choosing the wine, and she treated me like someone who was about to go away or who had just come back. I found this disturbing and I noticed that for all of the day afterward I thought about nothing except how to find sex in the streets.

She was careful not to play the part of the prying mother, so she asked me no questions, but spoke herself, as though she were being interviewed about her life on one of those long television programs. I think that, prompted by her dinners with me and her English guests at the hotel, she reinvented herself in those years as an Englishwoman of the genteel sort.