Ramiro’s parents had arrived from Buenos Aires and returned immediately with the body so as to hold the wake there. Then I told my mother about what had happened that morning, as I remembered it: my despair when I saw Ramiro go under and how I’d run to get Kloster and found that he wasn’t in the bar. The only day he’d left early, without going for a swim. My mother didn’t find this odd: it had been obvious that the sea was dangerous that morning. The hazard flag had been up on all the beaches since first light and probably Kloster had decided, quite rightly, to go home and leave his swim for another day. When I insisted that I found it suspicious, my mother looked worried. “It was an accident,” she said. “God’s will.” I think she was afraid I was going to start obsessing about Kloster again. She refused to discuss it any more, at least not till I was out of hospital.”

“You think Kloster saw that your boyfriend was drowning and went home, leaving him to die?”

“No. From where he was sitting he could hardly see the sea. It wasn’t that. Or at least it wasn’t just that. I didn’t know exactly how but he’d achieved what he’d set out to do: to have Ramiro die before my eyes.”

“Did you go back to the beach during that time? Did you see Kloster again?”

“I did, but not immediately. I stayed in my room, crying. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Ramiro had looked annoyed and left to go for his swim. And the insulting thing he said. It was my last memory of him. I couldn’t bring myself to go back to that beach for two or three days. I was truly afraid of Kloster now and felt too weak to confront him. Then I did go back very early one morning. There was a new lifeguard and, with the usual throng of people in January, everything seemed different. I looked inside the bar: Kloster wasn’t there. I went in and talked for a while with the owner. She said that the writer, as they called him, had left the day after Ramiro drowned.