marzo, ottobre, dicembre) that adorned the bedroom wall in our apartment in Barcelona, I mean, I wonder if it is the same make or the same series, if the very precise Berta would have continued buying them all these years and if they were therefore still being made. I could ask Noguera to send me that elegant calendar. Besides, in a few months' time it will be out of date and will have to be thrown out anyway, it will not last nor will it remind me for very long of what I am now incapable of remembering. Perhaps it would do me good to look at it during that time, for I fear that, from now on, no one will watch over my sleep nor will I watch over that of Natalia Manur. This morning, when I woke, she was not in our vast bed with its four lion's feet and she has still not come home. There may be nothing strange about this. I have slept so badly and so little for so many years that I now take a powerful soporific (twenty-five drops) that plunges me into such a deep torpor that until I have had my eight hours of sleep nothing can wake me apart, that is, from my own will, alerted before I drop off, or else another person's will to interrupt my slumbers and return me to the world: on occasions when Natalia needed me during the night, she had to call out my name and shake me and unbutton my pajama jacket and splash cold water on my forehead and neck. But last night, my thoughts were not vigilant, and she clearly did not need me, so she must have gone out early without my noticing and, quite possibly, she was in a hurry, so much so that she did not even leave me a note explaining where she was going or at least warning me that she would not be back for lunch or supper. Yes, she was probably in a hurry, because she seems to have gone off somewhere on a trip — it's impossible to know if she went by plane or train — and when one is traveling, there is never time to spare. Two expandable suitcases and a large bag are missing from the wardrobe where we keep our luggage, as are most of her more personal belongings, of which I would not now be able to make a list like Noguera's because, unlike him, I do not have them here before me. However she has taken with her the things one never leaves behind: almost nothing of hers remains in the bathroom and my toothbrush is alone again, as it was once before; I know that her drawers are now empty of her underwear and her wardrobes of her autumn clothes, which leads me to think — given that, in our hemisphere, spring is just beginning — that perhaps she has flown off to Argentina, the country where her brother Roberto (whom, it is true, she has not seen for a long time and whom she often misses) enjoys a prosperous lifestyle and where he has chosen to remain. Yes, perhaps, on an impulse, she decided to go and see him. But an impulse like that requires planning, and there is also the possibility that Natalia Manur has simply left me without saying a word, as she left Manur four years ago, about which I also dreamed this morning. (Natalia has so often told me how she used to say to him: "When I do finally leave, you won't even know.") During the last few weeks or possibly months (time is so slippery when one is constantly on the move and, during the years that we have lived together, my profession has meant that we have traveled the world together), she seemed tired of so much to-ing and fro-ing and tired too — just a little — of me. She had again developed those dark shadows under her eyes that only accentuate her femininity, and she laughed less than she used to, revealing the beautiful teeth that light up her face, and — an old habit acquired in early youth, or perhaps only in Brussels — she had resumed that furious gnawing of the skin around her nails, so that her two index fingers — especially those, but the others as well — had again taken on the ugly, childish, raw appearance they had had during our time in Madrid. But what worried me most was the abnormal weariness that overwhelmed her whenever we arrived in a new place where I was to sing. Something which, only four, three or two years ago, or even six months ago, was for her a source of the greatest pleasure seemed to have become a torment borne without any violent complaint, indeed with hardly any complaint at all, but borne — of this I am sure — with great suffering. On our last few trips, she did not even have the strength to unpack the suitcases: she still withstood the departure well and appeared completely composed and even cheerful during the extreme provisionality of the journeys themselves; however, once the bellboy had shown us to our room, she experienced a kind of invincible exhaustion and collapsed, as if felled by lightning, onto one of the beds in the hotel room. After a couple of hours lying there, dazed or in a light sleep, she gathered together sufficient strength to get undressed and take a shower; then she would lie down again and thus, alternating showers and siestas and a bit of reading or television, she would remain for the whole of our stay in whatever city we happened to be in. She no longer wanted to sally forth on her own to visit places (even though we had recently been to Prague, Paris and Berlin) nor attend my rehearsals (even though I had lately performed such highly prestigious roles as Aeneas and Pinkerton and Des Grieux) nor to pick me up afterwards to go and have supper in the company of illustrious colleagues and interesting people (even though we had recently coincided with Anna Telesca and with the picturesque Guillerme and the handsome Jerusalem). She asked for her meals to be taken up to her room, she insisted on speaking and hearing only Spanish and, in short, she passed through those cities — which not long ago she had been thrilled to visit and in which she had eagerly tracked down all kinds of ornaments and implements for our home — as if she only existed as a name on a plane ticket. She behaved like a character in an excellent comedy I saw recently on video, about a delightful ex-boxer, fat, loyal and punch-drunk, who had no idea whether he was in Chicago, New Orleans or Detroit, so accustomed had he become in his previous pugilistic life to enforced confinement to his hotel room. I don't know what Natalia did while I was rehearsing the opera or recording the record that had taken us to wherever we were, but during the brief moments on recent trips when we were together in the room, she just used to lie on the bed — often swathed in a bath towel because she didn't have the energy to get dressed again after a shower — reading all kinds of magazines or dozing or, at the least, yawning, and — the television always on, albeit on mute so as not to disrupt my studies or my practice or because she wasn't interested anyway or didn't want to hear another language — responding only in monosyllables to my comments or attempts at conversation and proffering only her cheek or her forehead in response to my displays of affection. In a couple of cities, a propos of nothing, she suddenly wondered out loud, in an almost nostalgic tone of voice, what had become of Dato, and the truth is that she no longer seemed to take the same pleasure in my voice or my singing: indeed I had seen her look distinctly bored — even pull a face — when I was doing my vocal exercises in her presence and had just performed a few vertiginous vibratos or stentorean tremolos, which once would have provoked her astonishment. In Paris and Berlin, she claimed to have a migraine and did not even attend my performances. She had never missed one before. And she did not seem a great deal happier in the brief periods we spent at home. But it was not until this morning, when I woke from my dream with the renewed image of the one moment (as I have already described to you) when her face appeared to me with utter clarity, when I realized that the look on her face in recent times, the non-expression that predominated when she was lying down, leafing through magazines or half-watching TV programs or, at most, standing at the window and gazing impassively down at a beautiful avenue or a historic square or an ancient church or at a country's enigmatic inhabitants transformed into articulated miniatures, was the same one I had seen that first time and which had made me realize that Natalia Manur (when I still did not know her name) was afflicted by — how did I put it? — a form of melancholy dissolution.