She regarded me in silence, the way one looks at strangers on the street or in the subway. She lit a cigarette and stayed where she was, her face masked by spirals of blue smoke. I suddenly thought that, despite herself, Nuria Monfort exuded a certain air of the femme fatale, like those women in the movies who dazzled Fermín when they materialized out of the mist of a Berlin station, enveloped in halos of improbable light, the sort of beautiful women whose own appearance bored them.
