grubby, slovenly, dirty people in the world, not to say poisonous ones too, indeed, however chic a place may be, there is contagion everywhere and a great deal of grime. This woman was evidently not the prudent sort, given that she clearly didn't even bother with underwear: her knickers had not remained at garter level or barely been pulled down at all, there simply were no knickers, as I confirmed or discovered when she revealed her whole figure to my now elevated eyes, her thighs were as unencumbered with clothes as were her ankles, her tight skirt pulled up to groin- and hip-level and, therefore, wrinkled (not that there was a great deal of fabric, it would doubtless be on the short side), a straight white tube skirt, her shoes, with their slender but sturdy heels, were the same colour, like the summer shoes women wore in the 1950’s, which was, generally speaking, the best and prettiest decade for female fashion, but they, like the skirt, were unexpected in London and worn outside of the season to which they were best suited, I saw, too, a yellow shape or smudge beneath which there was no bra, a blouse with a rounded neck and almost imaginary sleeves – sleeves like stumps, the upper part would cover only the tops of her arms, and the lower part, or so I deduced, would barely cover her armpits – most troubling of all were her strong, sturdy and very – very – bare thighs, not heavy, but compact and dense, as if the whole surface were filled to bursting, with not an ounce of excess fat, but making the most of every millimetre of skin, which was as taut as a tight wrapping, thighs which quite properly grew wider as they advanced up to her hips and groin and towards the dark triangle that I could see (at least I think I could), they looked vaguely Central American those hips or perhaps they, too, were reminiscent of the 1950’s when curves were fashionable, or perhaps it was her mass of curly hair and the enormous earrings – huge hoop earrings – that lent her a tropical air which need not necessarily have been authentic, despite the golden colour of her bare skin – it could never have been British skin, nor from many places in the Commonwealth – it might just be a choice she had made, a disguise chosen for a long night at the disco, just as De la Garza imagined he had got himself up as a black rapper, but had succeeded only in looking like some kind of alternative bullfighter or some absurd Goya
My gaze was fleeting, but not veiled, it was not an English gaze or a modern-day Spanish one as it had apparently been on the morning when I found myself confronted by Perez Nuix and her towel, she had been naked from the waist up, and this young woman – well, she seemed young to me, about thirty-five I reckoned – was naked from the waist down, I felt for a moment as if I had completed a jigsaw puzzle, but one of a rather Cubist bent, as if the two pieces were not an entirely harmonious fit (they were so different), and, besides, only their naked halves matched, not their clothed halves. And so my gaze lasted no time at all, but during that no-time-at-all my gaze was a truly searching one, I did not pretend that she was standing up, with her skirt pulled down, and that I did not know, therefore, whether she was wearing anything underneath or not. She too looked back at me when she spoke. Not defiantly, not coquettishly and not, of course, salaciously, not reproachfully or sarcastically, but with an amused expression on her face and, needless to say, without a flicker of embarrassment, as if she didn't mind in the least being seen in that rather inelegant position if she could manage to make a little joke of it and to discomfit or trouble me (although that last effect was purely incidental, she could not easily have predicted it without first having seen my face, I could have been a thug who might have responded by taking two steps forward), she more than any of the other women must have picked up on the comical, silly side of my explanation or question, addressed simultaneously, to eight women, no less, protected or hidden away, who, with an incredulous start, doubtless all stopped what they were doing, I was sure that as soon as my voice rang out all liquid ceased flowing into the eight toilet bowls, a collective retentive reflex reaction, a shutter, an eyelid, a contraction of the same controlling muscle, and this, fortunately, would have been equally unavoidable for the woman who continued to sit there with her legs imperturbably akimbo in that first moment and in those that followed – one, two, three, four; and five, that was how long it took for the door to creak open and for her four provocative words to be spoken, 'You come and see' – and in the moments that followed – five, six, seven, eight; and nine; or ten, that must have been how long they lasted, my shock, my photographic memorisation of the image, my grateful response and my resolute movement to close the door – and in those ten seconds I also had time to see the most troubling thing of all, a drop of blood fallen on the floor of the cubicle, or, rather, two, except that the second smaller drop lay, like a lentil, on her left shoe, it wouldn't be a problem, the shoes were so smooth and gleaming that, even though they were white, they looked like patent leather or like porcelain, it would be easy enough to remove that tiny stain from such a polished surface, always assuming she realised it was there.
I immediately thought what almost any man would have thought, for we tend to know almost nothing about menstruation – at most, we have seen the traces left behind on a bedspread or a sheet, I, at least, have always tried to know nothing beyond that – we don't even know if a drop or more than a drop
Comendador – my former schoolfriend, who subsequently went so badly astray – had also immediately assumed it must be the result of the sudden onset of menstruation when he saw the blood of that young woman on the wooden floor and on the sheets and on her long T-shirt, the blood of the drug-dealer Cuesta's temporary girlfriend whom Comendador believed had died after she stumbled and tripped and hit her head hard on a wall – it had made a sound like wood being chopped – and he had discovered a gash on her head as she lay unconscious, or, as he thought, dead. And, later, he had doubted that he had seen anything at all and had even admitted the possibility that he had mistaken for blood what had perhaps been only brandy or wine or even a dark stain on the floorboards. I was currently experiencing a feeling of unease or a sense of a problem in the making because of another man so like Comendador that there were moments when they seemed to me to be one and the same, Incompara was his name, and there was something about those two surnames that automatically made me think of them both, or which my personal sense of language linked together: Incompara, Comendador; Comendador, Incompara, as if, I don't know, as if they were of the same calibre or somehow analogous, equally commendable and comparable (well, certainly as regards going about the world with aplomb and brio and making a big splash).
But what flashed into my mind was that other bloodstain, the one I saw on the stairs in Wheeler's house, the one I had painstakingly cleaned up in the middle of the night that I spent there, well, in the early hours of Sunday morning really, but which was, as far as I was concerned, still Saturday night, given that, for me, the day had been lengthened out by books and given that I had still not gone to bed, I finally went to sleep, soothed or lulled by the murmurings of the river, so late or so early that I could already see a little light in the sky. I still did not know from whom or what it had come, that blood, for the following day over lunch I had finally asked Peter and Mrs Berry, but without success: I found their reply so disappointing that I began to doubt the existence of the large drop whose rim had resisted me the night before, reluctant to disappear and to be erased (and I had, up to a point, already foreseen that future uncertainty: one can always doubt anything that ceases and does not persist, which means that one is always in a state of doubt about everything, because nothing is ever constantly present, apart from the stars and the seasons, that is, but nothing human); and so, in a way, the same thing happened to me as happened to Comendador, who distrusted the reality of the various stains which, in his panic, he had seen in that apartment. But I felt no panic when I discovered mine, at the top of the first flight of Wheeler's stairs, although I had been drinking and was slightly feverish with words and my long hours of wakefulness, with my many tangential night-time readings, all interleaved with memories of my father, more his than mine: 'an assiduous collaborator on the Moscow newspaper,
I had to leave that busy and entirely inappropriate toilet, it was, after all, not my toilet, a long queue would be forming outside, I had been in there for a couple of minutes now, during which time no one had entered or left, the women inside being occupied, while those behind me, in the area by the mirrors, were by now, most of them,
