MR. VALDEZ LEFT his beautiful car in the basement of his apartment building where it sat, like a sleeping panther, smelling of leather and hot oil and ticking as it cooled. Mr. Valdez looked back at it with love, turned and climbed the stairs to the lobby.

On each side of the room there was a broad, red leather sofa and Caterina was sitting on one of them, the one behind the basement door, with her feet flung out in front of her and a big canvas bag on the seat beside her. Mr. Valdez didn’t even notice her. He walked from the door marked “Stairs to the Basement” straight to a half wall of pigeon holes, each one sealed with a hinged brass cover, each one numbered with black enamel figures.

Mr. Valdez unlocked his box and looked inside and then, with two fingers, like a magician, like a pickpocket, like a man with tweezers picking up broken teeth from a city pavement, he removed a postcard.

It was a postcard exactly like dozens of other postcards he had received before. In the past they had said “Tomorrow at 2” or “Tuesday afternoon.” But this one was different. This one said “I know what a dreadful mistake I made. Dying without you. I am so very sorry. Let me show you how much. Please forgive me. Grant me absolution tomorrow” and it was signed simply “M.” Mr. Valdez read it all in a second and tore the card to confetti.

It was only then, when he lifted his eyes from the wire wastebasket at his feet, that he noticed her sitting there, watching him.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” He said only “Hello” when, before, with his other women, he would have said, “Darling” or “My Angel” and he was conscious that he had made the change unselfconsciously. It was natural. The extra parts of him were torn away in front of this girl until only Luciano was left. He was smiling.

“You look happy,” she said.

“I suppose I am. Surprised to see you, too.”

“Sorry, should I go?” She swung her feet under her body as if to stand up. “I don’t want to pester you.”

“No, of course I don’t want you to go. Have you been here long?”

“Not long. Half an hour, maybe. Not angry with me?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Why should I be angry?”

“Well, we didn’t part happily.” She looked down at her ridiculous faded sneakers. “That business with the scar. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I’m not offended. You were right. It’s for me to apologize.”

“Silly. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Not really.” Mr. Valdez was baffled. How could he talk about something he could not see and did not understand? “Some things can’t be fixed by talking. Most things in fact. Actually, the more I think about it, I can’t think of a single thing that can be fixed by talking. When you are as old as I am, you will know that too and yet, just a short while ago—earlier this afternoon in fact—I did want to talk.”

“It’s not such a mad idea, talking. It cures most things. It can even cure wars.”

“The only thing that can cure a war is excess of pain. When people get sick of the pain, they stop the war.”

“When people get sick of the pain, they talk,” she said.

Mr. Valdez took his keys from his pocket. “Do you want to come up?”

“Again?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes. Do you want to? Again.”

“Yes.”

He took her hand and, in the lift, he kissed her, there, on the palm of her hand.

Caterina said: “You are very lucky to have a quiet, secret place like this.”

“You mean, like this lift?”

“I meant your lovely flat but, yes, even your lift. Some place where there’s nobody watching or listening. Some place where you can be alone or with somebody else. Some place where you can kiss.”

The lift stopped.

“Don’t you have such a place?” he said.

“I never did. Not ever. I live in a student flat and, before that, we all lived in the cottage, all of us in the one room.”

“Your mother and father too?”

“There was a curtain.”

“A curtain?” Mr. Valdez was amazed. He was amazed at the life this girl had led, amazed that she had so little, astonished that he wanted her so much in his own life.

“Yes, a curtain. We could pull it across at night to split the room up. But we were very young. Anyway, it’s not the worst thing in the world to think that your mother and father make love.”

Make love. Her mother and father made love on the other side of the curtain and yet she had asked him if he wanted sex.

“No,” he said. “Not the worst thing.” He opened the door. “And is there still only one room in your house?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Pappi died. I think my brother made another room on the outside of the house. I haven’t been home for a while.” She offered her face to be kissed again but he seemed not to notice.

“How did you come here, from that place with your little one-room house? How did you come here? Dr. Cochrane says you are one of his best students.”

“I was lucky,” she said. “And people were kind and I work. I work hard. I know how to work.”

“Yes,” he said. He put his fingers on the buttons of her shirt, his thumb and his first two fingers, ready to press them together and push and turn and open, and he found her fingers there too, brushing against his but this time she was helping him, not fending him off. This time she wanted to be naked with him. This time she wanted to be rid of her clothes.

“Chano,” the word still sounded new and strange in her mouth. “Chano, I don’t do this sort of thing. I don’t.”

He took his hand away in alarm. “But I wasn’t the first.” Suddenly the thought horrified him. Before—in the time before Caterina—it would have thrilled him, it would have added extra savor to the conquest, but now it made him feel like a thief. And then, because what he had said sounded like an accusation, he said: “Was I?”

She flung herself at him. She wrapped her arms around him. She stumbled across her stupid canvas bag so she could be close to him and she pressed her face into his shirt. “No,” she said, “you weren’t the first. But it feels like the first. There were boys before. You’re a man. There were fumbles in the dark but you aren’t like them. I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. I’m making more of this than it deserves and I threw myself at you in the first place. And then, when it happened, it was so good, it was all so good and then I left you this morning and I didn’t think you’d even call me again and I was ready for that. I told myself I could be grown up about it and then by the afternoon I’m sitting on your doorstep like a lost puppy. It’s not your fault. I’m sorry.” She stepped back and started pulling at the buttons of her shirt again, sniffling and saying: “Come on, come on!”

And now, when he put his hands on hers, it was to stop her and still her. She did not look at him so he took her face between his hands and kissed her, kissed her hair and her forehead, kissed her eyes, kissed her nose, her lips, her chin, kissed her and held her until they both cried. It was the second time Mr. Valdez had cried in the past thirty-seven years.