The narrator registers only the most general features of the women he pairs off with; one is a schoolteacher, another has very fair skin, etc. (Age is his primary criterion for potential sex partners, but the names of some of the women he lusts after, pale Blanca and the Candé girl—whose family name derives from candor, Latin for whiteness—are a reminder of Don Diego’s criterion, which was race.) Marcela, the journalist’s photographer coworker, is particularly difficult for him to perceive. “What am I like?” she asks him. His response, that she’s “unaffected and unselfish” seems to mean that unlike the other women in his life she is undemanding, easygoing, casual, always maintains a bit of mystery, never lets him see she’s tired. She requires nothing from him. And she is spectral, shape-shifting. At first unacceptably old, she suddenly grows young enough. He wonders whether she’s a virgin; she answers that she’s divorced. After she shows him a sheaf of photos she’s been taking of him without his knowledge, even before they started working together, he wonders whether she’s even interested in men. Her sardonic response—she seems to grasp how little about her he’s taking in—is as close as she ever comes to articulating anger.

How must it make her feel when he tells her later that his fantasy ambition is to direct films, like Ingmar Bergman? All he’s ever seen in her photographs is their subject matter. He notices nothing, says nothing, about her skill, framing, composition, texture, use of light, or vision of him, though she’s told him that her ambition is to photograph the aspects of people they themselves don’t see.

Marcela shares her spectral quality with a series of vanished loves he tells her about: the cloudless, pure girl he fell in love with when they both were seventeen, and whom he then, in contemporary parlance, ghosted; the girl he occasionally glimpsed from a window in the back of his house; the girl he once met on a tram and never saw again. The blankness of this romantic history connects the Petrarchan ideal of the love object as distant, inaccessible muse to the TV trope of the “disposable woman,” whose relationship with a protagonist allows her disappearance or death to generate strong emotion without need for much in the way of character development.