Mr Valdez could write a sentence as elegant as a swan but his sentences were like the swans served before a Renaissance prince: a swan stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a capon, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a poussin, stuffed with a partridge, stuffed with a lark, layer after layer, one inside the other, there to be discovered, looking like a swan. When he read the words of others, when he heard the words of others, he expected those layers to be in their words too. Sometimes they were not. There was nothing layered inside Caterina’s words – not in the words she spoke. Her stories were her stories but when she said: ‘Wouldn’t you rather have sex?’, when she said: ‘I would like to love you, Chano, if that’s all right,’ when she wrote: ‘I write,’ that was all there was. The simple truth. No layers. It was absolutely incomprehensible.