He’d have preferred his women to succeed each other as easily as those fish without a history, but women and dogs were totally unlike fish, even the fighting kind: moreover, he couldn’t rehearse in respect of women the hands-off pledges he’d sworn in relation to dogs. At the end of the day, he predicted, he’d join a society for the protection of street animals and men who were out of luck with women.

He put on his dark glasses and headed towards the bus-stop thinking that the barrio must look like he did, a landscape after an almost devastating battle, and he felt some innermost memory stirring. The evident reality of the main street clashed too sharply with the saccharine image of his memory of that street, an image the truth of which he’d come to doubt, or had he inherited it from the nostalgic tales his grandfather told him or simply invented it in order to pacify the past? You can’t spend your whole fucking life thinking, he muttered, while registering that the mild morning heat was helping the painkillers in their mission to restore weight, stability and primary functions to whatever he carried in his head, as he promised never again to repeat such alcoholic excess. His eyes were still smarting from sleep when he bought a packet of cigarettes and felt the smoke complementing the taste of coffee; once again he was a being in a fit state to think, perchance to remember. He regretted saying he wanted to die and to demonstrate his regret ran to catch an unimaginable almost empty bus that made him suspect that the New Year was off to an absurd start and that the absurd wasn’t always so benign as to appear in the form of an empty bus at such a time in the morning.

It was twenty past one but everybody was there; sure, nobody was missing. They’d divided into groups, and there were some two hundred students, and you could recognize them from their appearance: beneath the majagua trees, against the wrought-iron fence, were the people from Varona, long-time owners of that privileged spot with the best shade.