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suddenly seemed much older than sixty and to have lost the petulant confidence with which she’d welcomed the policemen.
    When she cried out a black woman silently
emerged from somewhere in the mansion. She walked noiselessly, as if her feet didn’t touch the ground. The Count noticed the bloodshot look in her bulging, shiny eyes. She didn’t greet the policemen, but sat down next to Matilde and started whispering words of consolation accompanied by almost maternal gestures. Then she got up, went out the way she’d come, and returned with a glass of water and the tiniest pink pill, which she handed to Matilde. The Count’s training enabled him to pick up a fleeting tremble in the black woman’s hands as they neared the out-of-control hands of Alexis’s mother. Still not acknowledging the Count or Manolo, the black woman said: “Her nerves have been very bad of late,” and she helped Matilde stand up and led her towards the stairs.
    The Count looked at Manuel Palacios and lit a cigarette. Manolo shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “Bloody hell,” and they waited. The Count, meanwhile, decided to use a blue and white ashtray inscribed GRANADA. Everything seemed clean and perfect in that house where suddenly tragedy had unexpectedly intruded. The black woman came down ten minutes later and sat down opposite them. Finally she looked at them, her eyes still red and shiny, as if she were running a temperature.
    â€œHer nerves have been very bad of late,” she repeated, as if it were a set phrase or the best her vocabulary could muster.
    â€œAnd comrade Faustino Arayán?”
    â€œHe’s at the Foreign Ministry, he left early,” she said, joining her hands together and pressing them between her legs, as if praying to an image nailed to the floor.
    â€œYou work here?” interjected Manolo.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBeen here long?”

    â€œOver thirty years.”
    â€œDo you know if Alexis went out from here yesterday?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDidn’t he live here?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBut this was his home, wasn’t it?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYes what: was it or wasn’t it, did he go out or don’t you know?”
    â€œYes, it was his home, but he didn’t live here and so he didn’t leave here. For months . . . Poor Alexis.”
    â€œSo where did he live then?”
    The black woman looked towards the staircase that led to the bedrooms. She hesitated. Should she ask permission? Now she did seem nervous, as she lowered her bloodshot gaze and bit her lips.
    â€œIn somebody else’s house . . . Alberto Marqués’s.”
    â€œAnd who might he be?” continued Manuel Palacios, perching his sparse buttocks on the edge of the chair.
    The black woman looked back at the staircase and the Count felt that anonymous sensation for which a girlfriend of his, for want of a better word, had invented the term liporis : embarrassment at somebody making a spectacle of themselves. That woman, in the year 1989, still harboured the atavistic instinct of deference: she was a servant and, what was worse, thought like a servant, wrapped perhaps in the invisible but tightly clinging veils of genetics moulded by numerous enslaved, repressed generations. Physical discomfort then replaced liporis , and the Count felt the desire to flee that world of glitter and veneer.
    The black woman looked back at Sergeant Palacios and said: “I think he’s a friend of Alexis . . . A friend he lived with. Poor Alexis, oh God . . .”

    When he found that the almost impossible address really existed, the Count shut the notebook where he’d transcribed various data from the stout file on Alberto Marqués Basterrechea and tucked it into his back pocket. He contemplated the miraculously cheerful bougainvillea in the garden under that anti-social two p.m. sun. Magenta, purple, yellow, like enchanted butterflies, their