These ‘private parties’ — which took place on Muriel’s birthday and saint’s day, or were impromptu affairs put on to entertain a visitor or celebrate some promising bit of news when it was still little more than a promise — usually had a fairly fixed guest list, with others being added as and when. Regulars on that list were Rico and Roy, whom Muriel, on my first night as a spy, had accused of having carnal relations with his despised wife, an accusation she had brushed aside. Rico was Professor Francisco Rico, who, although far more famous now than he was then, was nevertheless pretty well known; he was not yet forty, but already had a veritable library behind him (by which I mean books that he himself had written or created), and enjoyed a brilliant career as scholar, expert, righter of literary wrongs, luminary, highbrow, perfect pedant (for he made of his pedantry an art), professional schemer and, of course, eminent and much-feared teacher (he was probably already a professor when I met him; in fact, given his astonishing precociousness in all things, he had probably been a professor since puberty). He lived and taught in Barcelona and its environs, but travelled widely within Europe in order to scheme and plot (the Americas did not attract him, because it was a continent with no Middle Ages and no Renaissance) and he often came to Madrid to engage in murky and disastrous dealings (God had not called him to the path he insisted on travelling), to establish diplomatic relations with the various circles he had access to, including the world of politics, and to work on his candidature to the Real Academia Española, a body he probably despised deep down, but which he nonetheless wished to enter. He was clearly only prepared to remain outside those bodies where membership depended not on others, but solely on himself, just as he could happily leave behind him those places where the doors had already been flung wide to him and where, if possible, he was being begged to cross the threshold. Needless to say, he also came for his own amusement, and there was no doubting the affection bordering on adoration that he felt for Muriel. He clearly enjoyed Muriel’s company enormously and admired him too, perhaps not so much for his films — Rico did not care for the cinema, an art invented far too late and in what, for him, was a hideously decadent century — but for his personality and because of an affinity of character that meant they sparked each other off and generally got on like a house on fire: they both, each in his own way, tended to be arrogant and disrespectful and had a sharp sense of humour that not everyone understood. Such was the Professor’s veneration for Muriel that he pretty much extended it to everyone who surrounded him, as if their nearness to and acceptance of the maestro in itself gave them value, and it seemed to me that it was for this reason — at least in principle — that he acted as chevalier servant to Beatriz Noguera and, whenever he was in Madrid, often accompanied her to the theatre, to a museum, a concert or even shopping. He was a salacious fellow, as was clear from the overeager look on his face, although he was oblivious both to this and to the fact that women find such eagerness either a complete turn-off or rather attractive — there’s no halfway house — but I nevertheless believe that, regardless of the state of the Muriel marriage, the enormous respect and affection he felt for Muriel would have prevented him from getting close to his wife in any capacity other than that of companion, friend and helpmate, as an extreme gesture of deference towards Muriel with Beatriz as intermediary. It was quite likely that Rico and Beatriz also got on well and had developed their own estimable friendship; it was equally possible that the Professor’s eyes did occasionally linger on her opulent figure (he was a man who, like me and despite the difference in our ages, appreciated flesh and detested bone), or that their fingers might accidentally have touched when she was trying on a dress in a shop and invited him to feel the fabric, or that he had placed a hand on her shoulder, arm or waist to protect her from the speeding cars as she was about to cross the street, but nothing more than that, at least in my opinion. And Beatriz was three or four years older than him, enough for her to treat any suggestion or advance on his part with a certain irony, if she preferred not to take him up on them, but play them down and let them pass.
Rico’s salacious nature — or, perhaps, his strong sexuality — was evident in his soft, flexible mouth permanently occupied by a cigarette, in his oblique gaze hidden behind rather large spectacles that made him seem diligent and innocuous — but only when you first met him — it was there even in his prematurely bald head, which he carried with a poise and an aplomb unusual in those who go bald before their time, and which can often be a cause of complexes or even a kind of universal resentment, whereas he was all loquacity, good cheer and remarkable sans-façon, as if he were a Don Juan or a handsome, dashing fellow adorned with a fascinating toupee that women find magnetically attractive (his bald head was, in fact, like a battering ram, make of that what you will). Once, at Muriel’s apartment, he had the temerity to flirt in my presence with a girl I was going out with at the time — well, I was going out with several girls, and they, of course, as was normal among people our age, were going out with several other men — and who had come to pick me up at the end of my working day. His main method of attack always consisted in trying to impress whoever it was with his encyclopaedic knowledge, and this sometimes led him to misjudge his audience: to most twenty-one-year-old women — apart from a few rare exceptions brimming with curiosity — his excessive display of learning, in this case on the origin of my surname, would have seemed either boring or alarming or quite frankly bewildering.