He did not take anything from the compartment. I must have been calm and clear-headed because I checked that immediately; everything was there. He had hurt my wrist and later I would find a bruise on my shoulder which would take a week or two to disappear. I locked the door again be turning the dangling clasp around into its metal holder. It was easy to see how a piece of cardboard or wood or even a nail file held from outside could have pushed the little clasp right around again and unlocked the door. Still, I locked it and I left it locked.

For a week I felt as though I had jumped through glass, as though every bit of me had been cut or broken or beaten. I walked in a daze through Barcelona in the early morning: the shops pulling up their steel shutters to start the day, children going to school. I noticed the grey blue light softening the stone. I came to a corner, this corner, the corner I am looking out onto now, and I saw a fat woman with tightly permed black hair looking down at me from a balcony. The sign said pensión and I shouted up at her and pointed to my luggage. She made a sign with her hands that I was to wait and soon the little mouse, her husband, scuttled down and carried my suitcase up to the first floor. When I gave her my passport she showed me into this room.

For days I stayed in bed marking the time by the sound of the steel shutters of the shops in the street being pulled up and down. First at eight, half eight, nine. That was the morning.

[<    <    4.   >    >]