Barcelona

She looked at David. ‘Do you know what duende is?’ He shook his head. ‘No. Tell me. What’s duende?’ She was surprised to find herself doing this, making him feel less, under par. He was proud, accomplished in his own field – the law – and generally peaceable. She was in a strange mood. Lately she found herself growing dismissive, impatient, employi

Travel heightens the senses, makes small, easily forgotten details more acute, significant, imperishable. Travel makes of home a wound that accompanies him everywhere.

The afternoon sun beat down. Once, she caught sight of David up ahead and ducked into a shop. She found a café down a side street and sat outside with coffee and a cigarette. Sometimes she thought she could live on cigarettes alone, silently, deeply inhaling, letting thoughts gather, coalesce, then purge themselves in the exhalation.

She looked at the couple at the next table. When we are young, she thought, we have enormous hope, we expect that someone – a man bearing love and mystery and new ideas – will come and help reveal us to ourselves. She looked at David’s waiting face. He was no longer mysterious to her.

Before they joined the motorway she took out the poems. In the dark wake of your footsteps, my love, my love. ‘They never found his grave,’ she said. See how the hyacinths line my banks! I will leave my mouth between your legs, my soul in photographs and lilies. She would have preferred Granada. She would have liked to find the mountain road near A