Berta would sometimes think of Esteban Yanes, both during the predictable, normal start of her married life and during the anomalous time that followed, when she didn’t know what to believe, when she had no idea if her husband, Tom Nevinson, had or had not joined the company of the dead, if he still breathed the same air as her in some distant, hidden-away place or if, for some time, he had not breathed at all, exiled from the Earth or welcomed into it, that is, buried under its surface only a few metres beneath our feet, where we nonchalantly walk with not a thought as to what the earth might conceal. Or possibly thrown into the sea or into an estuary or a lake, or a large river: when you have no control over the fate of a body, the most absurd conjectures appear and reappear, and it’s not so very hard to imagine its return. The return of the living body, you understand, not of the corpse or the ghost. They neither console nor are they of any interest, or only to minds troubled by intense uncertainty or dissatisfaction.

After that January evening, she never again saw that banderillero suelto. He did finally explain that suelto was the name given to banderilleros who work independently, not as part of any one matador’s team (or only occasionally, as a substitute) but as a freelance, accepting whatever offers come their way and best suit them, four fights here, a couple there, another one over there, or a whole summer here. That’s why he didn’t usually cover the season in Latin America, the winter season, and remained unemployed from the end of October to March, more or less. Esteban Yanes would spend those months training and practising for a few hours each day, and live a life of leisure the rest of the time, going to the bars and restaurants frequented by his colleagues and by the big names and agents who stayed behind on this side of the Atlantic, being seen and hoping to be remembered by those who might take him on in the future. This worked well for him, he had enough work and earned enough to be able to ‘hibernate’, as he put it, that is, to eke out his savings and not have to earn a penny until the season began again around mid-March or so.

While they were chatting after the untraumatic and rather unspectacular loss of her virginity – a little blood, a brief pain, minimal and unexpected pleasure – Berta Isla knew at once that, whatever Yanes’s physical and personal attractions – he was a calm, confident man, funny and pleasant and no fool either, an inveterate reader, albeit unmethodical and disorganised, and an interesting conversationalist to boot – their worlds were too far apart and there was no way to reconcile them, or even have them coincide in time and space. She found the idea of reducing their relationship to sporadic sexual encounters unacceptable, not just because such reductions are impossible to control and you can end up faced with tacit obligations and timetables and demands, but also because, after that inaugural evening when two lots of blood had been shed, her feelings for Tomás Nevinson had not changed one jot, nor had her certainty that her place was at his side, once he finished his studies in England and everything returned to normal, that is, to Madrid. For her, Tom was what many people describe to themselves as ‘the love of my life’ – although they might never say this out loud – and which is often used to designate a chosen one when your life has only just begun and when you still have no idea how many chosen ones there will be nor how long that life will be.

Berta, though, never forgot that first time; however evanescent, no one does. She didn’t give Esteban Yanes her number and he didn’t give her his. She didn’t let him accompany her home in a taxi, as he wanted to do, even though it was fairly late by the time Berta recovered nearly all her clothes and set off to a metro station, with a plaster on her knee and with no tights, because the young man had not, in the end, gone out to buy her a new pair. Thus Yanes didn’t know where she lived, and although her surname was not that common, it only appeared fifty or so times in the telephone book, there was no question of him ringing all the Islas in the book just to try his luck. She alone could re-establish contact by presenting herself at his apartment or sending him a note, and although it was pleasant to know that this was a possibility and that she could take that initiative, she did neither. After a few years, she assumed that he would no longer live there, that he would have moved and perhaps married, or even left for another city. And so she merely kept that memory as a refuge, as an ever more distant and nebulous place – a rather special place that she vaguely missed – to which she could go in her mind whenever she wanted, like someone consoling herself by saying that if there had once been a time of insouciance and spontaneity, of frivolity and caprice, it must still exist somewhere, although it would be difficult to return to that time except in her slowly dissolving memory and in her frozen thoughts that neither advanced nor retreated, but kept revisiting the same scene that repeated itself over and over from the first to the last detail, until it took on the characteristics of a painting, always identical, infuriatingly fixed and unaltered. That is how she saw that youthful encounter, as a painting. The odd thing is that, as time passed and all trace of him faded in his absence, the features of the young banderillero whom she had only seen on that one occasion became blurred and confused with those of the equally young mounted policeman, whose features she had merely glimpsed for a moment as he rode after her and perhaps studied briefly while he remained still – his flexible truncheon resting on his wrist – and there were moments when she wasn’t sure which one she’d had sex with, the gris or the banderillero. Or, rather, she knew perfectly well that the beginning of her consummated sexual life had occurred with the latter, but she found it harder and harder to remember his face, or else his face and that of the policeman overlapped or became juxtaposed like interchangeable masks: the blue eyes and the wide-set, almost plum-coloured eyes, those teeth with a life of their own and the Andalusian peasant face, the thick eyebrows and the large, straight nose, the helmet and the narrow-brimmed hat concealing that abundance of hair, all formed a whole that was contained within the same venturesome day.

What never faded was the memory of that finger slipping beneath the thin fabric of her knickers and the exploratory caresses that followed, the kisses that were more hurried or impatient than passionate, the rapid disappearance of all the man’s clothes and of hers, apart from her skirt, which did not constitute an obstacle; the strangely welcome sensation that a man’s penis – any man; after all, she had only met that man little more than an hour before – could, after an initial struggle, enter her and stay there for a while at its ease, and with scarcely any resistance from the protective membrane that proved more tenuous than its reputation. Although, by then, its reputation was already much diminished, and nowadays it has none at all.