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at that point, I didn’t know who they were or even if they were real names. It looked more like some sort of linguistic game. My father made no mention of the four mothers, not on that piece of paper anyway. The previous day, I’d explained the situation to my mother and asked her to come with me to the apartment, but she persuaded me to go alone.
    â€œAren’t you curious?”
    â€œNo. You can tell me about it.”
    Her way of coping with sudden shock or disappointment was to feign indifference, which is what she always did when we started talking about my father.
    The apartment Gabriel had abandoned was on a mezzanine in Carrer Nàpols, very near Carrer Almogàvers and Ciutadella Park. It was an ugly building, erected in the fifties, with a car repair workshop at street level. The policeman told me that they’d confirmed that my father had lived at that address for more than ten years. His choice wasn’t surprising if the idea was to become invisible. In the mid-eighties that part of the city was a run-down area with a listless, desolate air, not unlike an industrial estate. It had become a no-man’s-land. The Barcelona North bus station, which was not yet renovated, was falling apart in the middle of a large vacant lot where rats scratched around among used condoms. The court building, which was swarming with people in the morning, closed in the middle of the afternoon and slumbered inits own weighty shadow. In that part of Carrer Almogàvers there were only workshops and garages used by transport companies, and the trucks made everything stink of diesel. (Now I wonder whether Gabriel settled there because he liked the smell.) Whatever life there was in the area appeared after dark, in the form of transvestites who plied their trade on the street corners. With their painted faces, four-inch heels and skintight clothes, they drifted like zombies under the yellow glow of the streetlamps, trying to attract curb-crawling customers who, if they weren’t interested, were ordered in blood-curdling screeches to fuck off.
    At precisely that time, I’d spent two academic years going to English classes at an academy in Passeig de Sant Joan, very close to the Arc de Triomf. Looking back, I’ve speculated more than once that, one of those winter evenings while I was killing time in the Bar Lleida before my class, I might have come across my father. Two pairs of roaming eyes meet for an instant and move on as each stranger returns to his own world. It could have happened, but I don’t find anything very comforting in this thought.
    With a lawyer’s detachment, I opened the door of the apartment. I admit that my intentions were very hazy: have a look at the place, try to find some clue as to Gabriel’s whereabouts—it was years since I’d stopped calling him “Dad”—and forget about the whole thing, the sooner the better. I had no interest in looking for him and still less in paying his rent, which is what happened in the end, but now I’m jumping ahead. Although the apartment was cold and stuffy, I was struck by an odd sense of recognition. I now believe that it was intuition, almost part of my DNA, that I unconsciously projected onto those four walls.
    As I started to move through the apartment, I felt reassured. As if I’d been doing it all my life, I raised one of the roller blinds in the dining room, and a little more light came in, a slanting brightness. A meter from the window, directly opposite, was the wall of a parking garage that had been constructed in the middle of the block. Gabriel’s absence could be felt in every corner of the apartment since dust lay thick on the furniture, giving it a ghostly air, but, for the record, it was neither depressing nor pathetic. There was nosense of that paralyzed—rather than peaceful—atmosphere that settles over the objects in a house when there’s been a sudden death. Rather the