Woes of the True Policeman

house with an open kitchen, and the first few nights, dazzled by the novelty, they cooked together, talking and moving constantly from the kitchen to the living room, wiping the counter, watching each other cook, and then eating, one of them perched on a stool while the other served, as if they were at a bar, taking turns being waiter and customer.

2
    When life returned to normal, Rosa had time to fall in love with the streets of Santa Teresa, cool streets, streets that in a secret way spoke of a field of transparencies and Indian colors, and she never took a taxi again.
    Accustomed as she was to the colorful, perfectly demarcated streets of Barcelona or the perfectly fussy streets of the Casco Antiguo—the streets of a civilization, or in other words real streets—the streets of Santa Teresa seemed somehow newborn, streets with a secret logic and aesthetic, streets with their hair down, where she could walk and feel alive walking, on her own and not a part of .
    And also, she discovered in surprise, they were streets shooting outward, urban and at the same time open to the country, a country of great mysterious spaces that crept in during the first hours of dusk down streets shaded by stunted or powerful trees, in a system she couldn’t explain to herself, as if Santa Teresa were interleaved with even the humblest of the nearby hills, viewed from an impossible perspective. As if the streets were the barrels of multiple telescopes trained on the desert, on the planted fields, on the scrubland and pastures, or on the bare hills that on moonlit nights seemed to be made of bread crumbs.

3
    Rosa Amalfitano and Jordi Carrera began to write to each other a week after the Amalfitanos arrived in Mexico. The first to write was Jordi. After a strange week in which he could hardly sleep a wink, he decided to do something that in all his seventeen years he had never done before. After much hesitation, he bought what seemed to him the most appropriate postcard, a panel from a comic strip by Tamburini and Liberatore (one of the two of them, he thought he remembered, but everything was so hazy, had died of an overdose), and after writing a couple of sentences that seemed stupid to him, I hope you’re well, we miss you (why the fucking plural?), he put it in the mail and tried in vain to forget her.
    Rosa’s typed response was three pages long. It said, more or less, that she was advancing by forced marches into adulthood and that the feeling this gave her was wonderful and exciting at first, though later, as always, one got used to it. She also talked about Santa Teresa and how pretty some of the colonial buildings were: a church, a porticoed market, and the house of the bullfighter Celestino Arraya, now a museum, that she had visited soon after arriving, as if magnetically drawn. Not only was this Celestino handsome, he was a local luminary killed in the flower of his youth (here Rosa went on to make various half-comprehensible and not quite successful jokes about the flower of desire and the flower of sin), and there was an impressive statue of him in the Santa Teresa cemetery that she planned to visit later on. She sounds like a sculptor or an architect, thought Jordi despondently after reading the letter for the tenth time.
    It took him twenty days to answer. This time he sent her an extra-large postcard of a Nazario comic. Faced with the impossibility of telling her what he really needed to say, he launched into a garbled but scrupulously truthful account of his latest basketball game. It’s like an absurdist poem, thought Rosa when she read the postcard. The game was described as a series of electrokinetic and electromagnetic instants, bodies moving in a rapid blur, the ball sometimes too big or too small, too bright or too dark, and the shouts of the crowd—which Jordi compared enthusiastically (for once) to the cries at a Roman circus—like a metronome behind his ribs. I hope I’m not overdoing it, he thought. As for himself, he insinuated that he had played badly, inattentively, listlessly, and by this he meant that he was feeling down and he missed her.
    This time Rosa’s response was only two pages long. She wrote about her English classes, the exploratory walks she took around the neighborhoods of Santa Teresa, the solitude she deemed a precious gift and that she spent reading and getting to know herself, Mexican food (here in passing she mentioned Catalan white beans with sausage in a way that Jordi found