As I smoked that cigarette and waited for my pulse to slow down, I didn’t know – I couldn’t know – everything that was at stake at that moment. Had I known, I would probably have found the strength to repress, to suppress, the image of those eyes once and for all. Because at that moment the end of my marriage was secretly being decreed, along with my forthcoming marginalisation – to the very edge of society – and what many, including me, see as ‘my madness’. Strangely enough, until that moment it hadn’t occurred to anyone to say, or presumably to think, that I was mad. And yet I was absolutely out of my tree. My consciousness was narrower than the head of a pin. No one applauded when I ended my marriage, quit my job and began spending my time drifting around and doing ‘strange things’ – but I’m getting it wrong again: there was a rambunctious and brutally frank Galician man who congratulated me heartily, roaring with laughter, when he heard about my divorce; and I have him to thank for what little oxygen I was able to breathe during that long and difficult time. On the faces of everyone else I knew, both family and friends, was written blame, suspicion or pity, or a combination of all three.