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loose paving stones that led up to the front door steps. Carvalho’s neglect had allowed weeds to sprout everywhere, and on the porch rotten leaves from the previous autumn had formed a slippery light brown mulch that any visitor’s shoes invariably brought into the house. Carvalho’s feet trod their way across the geometric tiles of the entrance hall, and followed the trail of light his hand magically produced from the switches. July filled the evening sky with warmth, but Carvalho needed to light a fire if he was to be able to think in a relaxed mood. To compensate, he stripped off to the waist and opened shutters and windows to allow the drier outside air and the last sunlight into the house. As he pushed open the shutters, his eyes took in the green horizons to the north and east, as well as the urban geometry of the city laid out at the foot of the mountain. Today the cloud of pollution was reduced to a kind of polar ice cap hanging over the industrial, working-class districts down by the port.
    Carvalho went to the basement to fetch firewood. He made several trips, and then had to clear out the remains of the fire from five days earlier. Four nights at Charo’s were too many. Carvalho was in two minds. On the one hand, he felt bad about abandoning his own home and a regular, more routine existence. On the other, he remembered Charo’s velvety skin, and the softness of her more intimate recesses. She had even caressed him tenderly.
    He searched in vain for some newspaper to help light the pile of firewood he had built according to the manual of good fire-lighters. From bottom to top, the wood formed a strict pyramid from smallest to heaviest. But he had no paper to start it with.
    ‘I should read the news more often,’ he said out loud to himself.
    In the end he had to go over to one of the bookshelves that lined the room. He hesitated, but finally chose a big green book with lots of pages. As he carried it to the funeral pyre, Carvalho read some fragments at random. It was entitled
Spain as a Problem
, written by someone called Laín Entralgo at a time when it was thought that Spain’s problems consisted simply of the problem of Spain itself. He pushed the open book under the sticks in the fireplace. As he lit it, he again felt torn: on the one hand, he did not like to see the book burn; on the other, he could hardly wait for the flames to shoot up and reduce it to a pile of obliterated words.
    Once the fire was burning brightly and warmly, Carvalho went to the kitchen and laid out everything he had bought in the order he would need it to cook his meal. The first thing was to go down to his wine cellar. He had had the partition between two walls knocked down, which left the soil and rock of the mountainside exposed. In it he had dug a small cave, where the dusty sides of wine bottles gleamed dully by the light of an almost infrared bulb. Carvalho looked along the row of whites, and eventually chose a Fefiñanes that was one of the few Spanish wines in his selection. Clutching the Fefiñanes in one hand, he was tempted by a Blanc de blancs from Bordeaux. But his dinner was not even worthy of this second-rank great wine from France. Each time he came down to his cellar, he carefully picked up and looked at one of the three bottles of Sauternes that he was storing for his Christmas seafood feast. Sauternes were his favourite white wine, apart from the incomparable Pouilly-Fuissé, which in his opinion ought to be reserved exclusively for the last wishes of intelligent gourmets down on their luck. He sighed, still clutching his Fefiñanes, and climbed back up tothe kitchen. He cleaned the fish and peeled the prawns, then boiled the fish bones and the pink shells together with an onion, a tomato, some cloves of garlic, a hot pepper and strips of celery and leek. This liquid was essential for Carvalho’s
caldeirada
. While he was gently bringing it to the boil, he fried some tomato, onion and more peppers. As soon as