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that I had lived with her for a whole year, she, during the last eighteen months of her life and during her only months as a married woman, must have thought about me often enough to have mentioned me to her husband, Navarro, enough for him, on the same day that he buried her, to write to me, giving me all that unsolicited information which I certainly did not deserve, given all those years of total silence and lack of interest on my part. The news, however, must have affected me, otherwise Berta would not have appeared in my dream this morning. And although I have not retained in my memory Noguer's precise name, I can recall fragments of his letter, which I re-read several times two weeks ago, when I received it, trying to imagine what he did not tell me. I cannot help thinking about Berta's furtive death, which occurred without witnesses or warning and in her sleep, something which would never have happened while she lived with me. There is only one thing more solitary than dying without anyone knowing and that is dying without knowing oneself what is happening, without the dying person being aware of his or her own dissolution and end, as may have been Berta's case. There is no doubt, though, that Noriega must have been an inattentive husband, one who did not watch over her sleep with as much constancy and alertness as I did, and in that sense he is as at least as guilty as he tried to make me feel by twice mentioning the books which I carelessly, but with no ill intent, long ago left behind in another apartment in Barcelona, the one that Berta shared with me, the books which—as I understand it—were responsible for her fall. I had never stopped to think about those books, which were destined to occupy a millimeter in the great mound of my forgettings and which, nevertheless, I now learn have been leading, without my knowing or suspecting it, a life of their own "until today," and were the indirect cause of the death of a person whom I know was very close to me and, even more surprising, that they are still mine, since Navarro is offering to restore them to me. Why did Berta not get rid of them, rather than take them with her when she moved to begin a new life in the tower where she found her death "on a day like any other"? Why did she not appropriate them and mix them up with hers and those of Noguer, her husband, as married couples do with the remnants of their single lives? Were they—are they—so unequivocally mine? I barely recognize them. And where was she taking them on that very ordinary day? Perhaps down to a smelly, crumbling, rat-infested cellar in order to abandon them there as proof that the hurt I must have caused her was finally over? Or was she perhaps going to dump them out in the steep street, beside the rubbish bins in that unfamiliar neighborhood, so that suddenly, on that day like any other, they would finally be crushed to nothing along with the burst plastic bags full of leftovers, peelings and boxes containing medicines, after years of being kept separate and apart like relics? Or was she, on the contrary, rescuing them from some dusty, gloomy attic on a day which was like any other apart from a feeling of intense and unconfessable nostalgia for the life with me that she had lost four years before? It is Noriega who says that it was a day like any other. Was I present in the unknown life of Berta Viella until the last moment? What would she have been dreaming about when death came to her? And what can Navarro be like, what can he be like, this chosen one who speaks of "commitments" and beside whose sleeping form his chosen one could die spitting blood while still immersed in nightmares and with half her body ("her thighs uncovered") exposed to a bedroom which might have been spacious or cramped, squalid or welcoming, light or dingy, which might have been well-heated or just damp and warm like the whole city of Barcelona? A bad city to die in. I wonder if that bedroom has more than one window