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interior patio. Mateo listened to those names of persons and places with the look of one who doesn’t completely connect with things so far in the past. He bowed his head and smiled, although I also thought I noticed an expression of suspicion or alarm or disbelief in his face. Maybe he was afraid that I was going to cheat him, or assault him, like many of the thugs who hung around that area—you saw them all the time, kneeling in clusters beside the entrance to the metro and dealing in God knows what. I had to go, I was very late for an appointment that was probably futile in the first place, I hadn’t had breakfast, my car was double-parked, and Mateo Zapatón
was still holding my hand with distracted cordiality and smiling, his mouth half-open, his lower jaw dropped a little, with the gleam of saliva at the corners of his lips.
    â€œYou don’t remember, maestro?” I asked him. “You always called me Sacristan.”
    â€œOf course I do, man, yes,” he winked and stepped a little closer, and it was then I realized that now I was the taller. He put his other hand on my shoulder, as if in a benevolent attempt not to disappoint me. “Sacristan.”
    But the word didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though he kept repeating it, still holding the hand that now I wanted to get free, feeling trapped and nervous about continuing on my way. I pulled back but he didn’t move, the hand with the soft, moist palm that had clutched mine still slightly raised, the hat with the tiny green feather twisted around on his forehead, standing there alone like a blind man, in the middle of the plaza, supported on the great pedestal of his large black shoes.

copenhagen
    SOMETIMES IN THE COURSE of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys. It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you’re told: a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey. Anyone who travels can surround himself with a silence that will be mysterious to strangers observing him, or he can yield, with no fear of the consequences, to the temptation of shading the truth, of gilding an episode of his life as he tells it to someone he will never see again. I don’t believe it’s true what they say, that as you travel you become a different person. What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations and your past, just as you reduce everything you possess to the few items you need for your luggage. The most burdensome aspect of our identity is based on what others know or think about us. They look at us and we know that they know, and in silence they force us to be what they expect us to be, to act according to certain habits our previous behavior has established, or according to suspicions that we aren’t aware we have awakened. To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present. A woman and a man look at each other with a tingle of intrigue and desire as they take seats facing each other: at that moment they are as detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from names as Adam and Eve were when they first looked upon each other in Eden. A thin and serious man with short and very black hair and large dark eyes gets onto the train at the station in Prague and perhaps is trying not to meet the eyes of other passengers coming into the same car, some of whom look him over with suspicion and decide that he must be a Jew. He has long, pale hands and is reading a book or absently staring out the window. From time to time he is shaken by a dry cough and covers his mouth with a white handkerchief he then slips into a pocket, almost furtively. As the train nears the recently invented border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, the man puts away the book and looks for his documents with a certain