I ALMOST RENTED ANOTHER CAR to go and fetch Esther from the Almería airport; I was afraid she would get an unfavorable impression from the Mercedes 600 SL coupe, but also from the swimming pool, the Jacuzzis, and more generally the display of luxury that characterized my life. I was mistaken: Esther was a realist; she knew that I had had some success and therefore expected, logically, that I would live in fine style; she knew all kinds of people, some very rich, others very poor, and found nothing remarkable in it; she accepted this inequality, like all the others, with a perfect straightforwardness. My generation was still scarred by different debates around the question of which economic regime one should wish for, debates that always concluded with agreement about the superiority of the market economy—with the sledgehammer argument that populations on which another mode of organization had been imposed had zealously and even petulantly rejected it, as soon as they had the chance to. In Esther’s generation, those debates themselves had disappeared; capitalism was for her a natural habitat, in which she moved with the grace that characterized all the actions in her life; to strike in protest of planned redundancies would have seemed to her as absurd as striking against the weather getting colder, or the invasion of North Africa by crickets. The idea of any form of collective demand was generally foreign to her; it had always seemed obvious to her that, on the financial level as for all the essential questions of life, everyone had to look after themselves, and sail their own ships without relying on help from anyone else. No doubt in order to toughen herself up, she felt compelled to exercise strict financial independence, and although her sister had quite a lot of money, she had, since the age of fifteen, insisted on earning her pocket money herself, buying her own discs and clothes, even if it meant she had to do tedious jobs like distributing brochures or delivering pizzas. She didn’t, however, go as far as offering to pay her share in restaurants, or anything like that; but I sensed from the beginning that giving her too sumptuous a gift would have unsettled her, it would have been a slight threat to her independence.