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years before) for eighteen months, which turned out to be the last eighteen months of Berta's life. He assumed that I would want to know that this person no longer existed. Indeed, he gave me only facts (he refrained from describing to me his state of mind, his despair or his relief), for which I was grateful, for in that way, Berta's death—just facts, detailed but dispassionate—seems to me rather like those deaths shown on television or reported in the newspapers, and so, although it is true, I can allow myself not to understand it. They lived, he told me, that man whom I do not know and whose name I cannot even remember now (but it began with an N, Noriega or Navarro or Noguer), in one of those houses in Barcelona known to us as towers, and which are two or three stories high and are found mainly in the upper part of the city. One day ("a day like any other, exactly eleven days ago"), Berta had fallen on the stairs "as she was going down them carrying some books of yours that she still had from the time when you used to live together," and she had fallen so hard and so spectacularly that she had vomited blood "as soon as she stopped falling." A doctor friend or neighbor, evidently incompetent, had failed to establish a link between the two things, instead he had advised them not to worry too much and, after treating Berta for a few minor bruises on her arms and legs, had merely told her to rest for a couple of days, to see how things progressed and to make sure she got over any concussion. Berta did appear to have suffered only minor bruising, apart from the momentary shock of the fall and the sight of her own blood, which shot out of her mouth like a flame and stained three or four steps and which, what with the worry, they had not cleaned up until the following day, by which time it had already dried and darkened, just as my books had not immediately been picked up and indeed had not been put in order "until today." Berta made an immediate recovery and resumed her usual duties, but on the ninth day after the fall, and only two days before that man, Noriega, had sat down to write me the letter, she did not wake up. When her husband awoke ("at half past seven, in order to go to work," although he did not specify what he did), he found her curled up in the bed, with her nightdress all rucked up and her thighs uncovered, facing him and dead, with a smudge of semi-coagulated blood still trickling out—more slowly with each minute that passed—from her pale, half-closed lips. Her husband, Navarro, gave no further explanations, as if the medical causes of her death no longer mattered to him and should not matter to me. Nor did he vent his anger on the negligent doctor or on himself. "I buried her today," he said in the singular, as if he had buried her alone and with his own hands, as if Berta were a pet. "I thought you might want to know." Once one knows the things one knows it is impossible to know whether one wants to know them or not. I don't honestly know if I wanted to know that Berta was dead, but now I do know and that's that, and if I dream about it, it is no longer something imagined or allegorical, merely a repetition of what actually happened. Noguer's letter concluded with those words, although he added a postscript in which he asked me if I wanted to come and collect the books of mine that Berta was carrying when she fell down the stairs; and meticulously, on a separate sheet, he included a list of fifty or so titles, of which I only remembered owning or reading three or four or five: The Fall of Constantinople, Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Wagner Nights, Our Ancestors, and Pnin. That is how the titles appeared on Noriega's list, with no mention of the authors. He clearly must have heard a lot about me to decide to write when he did not know me at all, which meant that, while I had not thought about Berta (nor indeed about myself) during the last four years, so much so that I did not even want to remember