Hours later, going over what had happened that night, I thought that untimely memory was actually a premonition. That's what I thought then, but I could have thought it long before, just when, as I finished my whisky in that bar on the Rambla and took out my wallet to pay for it, a bunch of disorderly papers I kept in it fell out onto the floor; I bent down to pick them up: there were credit cards, my driver's licence and ID card, overdue bills, pieces of paper with scribbled phone numbers and vaguely familiar names. Among them was a folded and wrinkled photograph; I unfolded it, looked at it for a second, less than a second, recognizing it without wanting to recognize it, more incredulous than astonished; then I folded it up againquickly and put it back in my wallet with the other papers. I paid at once, went out onto the street with a sensation of vertigo or real danger, as if I were carrying a bomb in my wallet, and started walking very fast, not feeling the night'scold, not noticing the lights and people of the night, trying not to think about the photograph but knowing that image from a life I almost believed cancelled could explode before the stone door my future had become, opening a crack through which reality, future and past, would filter into the present. I went up the Rambla, crossed the plaza de Catalunya, walked up the paseo de Gracia, turned left when I got to Diagonal and kept walking very quickly, as if I needed to exhaust myself as soon as possible or gather courage or postpone as much as possible the inevitable moment. Finally, at a corner in Balmes, in the changing light of a traffic signal, I made up my mind: I opened my wallet, took out the photo and looked at it. It was one of the pictures of Paula and Gabriel with Rodney during my friend's visit to Gerona, and also the only image of Paula and Gabriel that I had accidentally kept: I'd got rid of the rest when I moved to Barcelona. There they both were, on that forgotten piece of paper, like two ghosts who refuse to disappear, diaphanous, smiling and intact on Les Peixeteries Velles bridge; and there was Rodney, standing up straight between the two of them, with his patch over his eye and his two enormous hands resting on the shoulders of my wife and my son, like a Cyclops ready to protect them from an as yet invisible threat. I kept looking at the photograph; I won't try to describe what I was thinking: to do so would distort what I felt while I was thinking. I'll only say that I had been staring at the photo for a long time when I realized I was crying, because the tears, which were streaming down my cheeks, were soaking my flannel shirt and the collar of my coat. I was crying as if I would never stop. I was crying for Paula and for Gabriel, but perhaps most of all I was crying because up till then I hadn't cried for them, not when they died or in the months of panic, blame and reclusion that followed. I cried for them and for me; I also knew or thought I knew that I was crying for Rodney and, with a strange sense of relief — as if thinking of him was the only thing that could exempt me from having to think about Paula and Gabriel — I imagined him at that very moment in his house in Rantoul, his provincial two-storey house with an attic and a porch, a front yard with two maples on Belle Avenue, with his calm, routine work as a schoolteacher, watching his son grow up and his wife mature, redeemed from the incurable, maladjusted fate that for more than thirty years had fiercely cornered him, master of all that I'd had in the glossy and inaccessible time of the photograph that now brought it back.
I don't know how long I'd been standing beside the traffic light when I managed to put the photograph back in my wallet, crossed Balmes and, still crying (or I think so), started walking as far as Muntaner and then towards the upper part of the city. Again I tried not to think of anything, but I thought of Paula and Gabriel; doing so hurt like an amputation: to avoid the pain I forced myself to think about Rodney again. I remembered our tireless conversations at Treno's, my visit to his father in Rantoul, my ever-postponed plan to one day write his story and the conversation we had in Madrid, when I discovered with a repugnance that now struck me as repugnant that my friend had the deaths of women and children on his conscience. And at some point, among the images that crossed my disturbed mind like clouds or meteorites, I remembered Rodney at that party of Wong's, surrounded by people and yet impervious, as alone as a lost animal in the middle of a herd of animals of another species, I remember him on Wong's porch steps, that same night, tall, wrecked, vulnerable and hesitant, wrapped in his sheepskin coat and fur hat as I observed him from the window that overlooked the street and the snow fell on the road in big flakes and he looked at the night without crying (although at first I'd thought he was crying), looked at it more like he was walking along a narrow pass beside a very dark abyss and there was no one who had as much vertigo and as much fear as him. And then I suddenly understood what I hadn't understood that night so many years before, and it was that if I had left the party and had gone in search of Rodney it was because, watching him from the window, I knew he was the loneliest man in the world and that, for some unquestionable reason that was nevertheless beyond my reach, I was the only person who could keep him company, and I also understood that on this night so many years later the tables had turned. Now I was responsible for the death of a woman and a child (or I felt responsible for the death of a woman and a child), now I was the loneliest man in the world, a lost animal in the middle of a herd of animals of a different species, now it was Rodney, and perhaps only Rodney, who could keep me company, because he had travelled long before and for much longer than me the same corridor of fright and remorse along which I had been feeling my way and had found an exit: only Rodney, my fellow, my brother — a monster like me, like me a murderer — could show me a sliver of light in that tunnel of woe through which, without even having the energy to want to get out of it, I had been walking alone and in the dark since the deaths of Gabriel and Paula, just like Rodney had done for thirty years since he rounded some bend on some trail in some unnamed place in Vietnam and saw a soldier appear who was him.
That night I went home earlier than usual, lay down in bed with my eyes open and, for the first time in many months, slept for six hours straight. I had two dreams. In the first only Gabriel appeared. He was playing table football in a big, dilapidated, empty place like a garage, hitting the balls with adult, almost ferocious glee; he had no opponent or I couldn't see his opponent, and he didn't seem to hear my shouts as I tried to get his attention; until suddenly he let go of the handles and, frustrated or furious, turned towards me. 'Don't cry, Papa,' he said then, with a voice that wasn't his, or that I couldn't quite recognize. 'It didn't hurt.' The second dream was longer and more complicated, more disconnected as well. First I saw Paula and Gabriel'sfaces, close together, almost cheek to cheek, smiling at me in an inquisitive way as if they were on the other side of a pane of glass. Then Rodney's face joined theirs and the three began to superimpose like transparencies, blending into each other, so Gabriel's face changed until it turned into Paula's or Rodney's, and Paula's face changed until it turned into Rodney's or Gabriel's, and Rodney's face changed until it turned into Gabriel's or Paula's. At the end of the dream I saw myself arriving at Rodney's house in Rantoul, on a bright, sunny day, and discovering, with unspeakable anguish, between false smiles and suspicious looks, not his wife and son living with my friend, but Paula and Gabriel, or a woman and a boy who imitated Paula and Gabriel's voices and appearance and even their affectionate gestures but who, in some perverse way, weren't them.