That annoyed me. Could she not have said: You don’t have to go, you can stay if you want? “Did things have to go the way they did? Could they have gone differently?”

She looked at me, astonished. “My brave—”

“Drop the ‘brave knight’ bit. I loved you. You told me then that I had never been in love – do you remember? – and you were right, I never had, that was my first time. I was a bit clumsy, I know, but I’m not complaining, that would be ridiculous. All I want to know is whether I could have done something better, and if so, could things have worked out between us.”

“You mean, could I have been part of your law firm life in Frankfurt, with golf clubs, tennis, a subscription to the opera?”

“We could have gone abroad, to America or Brazil or Argentina. I would have settled in quickly and learned the language and the legal system and—”

“And soon you’d have had a prosperous legal firm and joined the high society of wherever we ended up.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Have you ever represented normal people – workers, renters, people whose health was ruined, battered women? Have you ever brought a case against the state? The police, the church? Have you defended political activists? Have you ever risked anything? I was looking for someone like that. Someone who would take a risk, someone I could take a risk with. Even life itself. What did you say yesterday? Mergers and acquisitions? Who cares who merges with whom, and who acquires whom? Not even you can be interested in that. You enjoy the fact that you can do it, that other people aren’t getting one over on you because you’re getting one over on them. You like the money, the fancy hotels, the first-class flights. Did you ever stop to think about the real world, about justice in the real world?”

“There can be justice and injustice in mergers and acquisitions.”

“Have you never dreamed of more? Of justice for the exploited and the oppressed? Tell me you haven’t always been this way.”

I poked around in my spaghetti and focused on eating. She ate too, but kept her eyes on me and waited for an answer. What was I supposed to say? I was proud of my pragmatism; the most extravagant fantasy I’d had in my entire life had been to move with her to Buenos Aires, serve drinks by night and study by day – and soon be back on top. If that hadn’t worked out, if I’d been stuck in Buenos Aires with Irene, living in a hole, scraping by with third-rate cases, engaging with abstruse political causes – I didn’t want to imagine that life.