While the Women are Sleeping by Javier Marías

less lovely, a voice that, contrary to her mistress’s predictions, had not brought her love, not at least of the permanent, tangible kind. But whenever she was about to give in to that temptation, she would suddenly remember the young man’s discreet, authoritative gesture—one finger on his lips, repeated now and then with a slightly teasing look in his eyes—and so she kept silent. The last thing she wanted was to make him angry. Perhaps ghosts got as bored as widows did.
    One day, Elena noticed a sudden change in the expression on the face of that man, half-peasant, half-soldier, with the holes in his clothes which she always felt an impulse to sew up, so that the night chill from the sea air would not slip through them. Señora Suárez Alday’s health began to decline, and a few days before her death (although no one knew then that she would die so soon) she asked Elena to read from the Gospels rather than from novels or poems. Elena did as she requested and noticed that whenever she pronounced the name ‘Jesus’ — which was often—the man would grimace in pain or sorrow, as if the very name hurt him. By the tenth or eleventh time, the pain must have become unbearable, because his always rather diffuse, but nonetheless perfectly distinguishable body grew gradually more and more tenuous until it disappeared altogether, long before she had concluded her reading session. Elena wondered if the man had been an atheist, an enemy of official religions. To clarify this, she insisted, a couple of days later, on reading her mistress a novel much praised by the critics, Enriquillo , by the Dominican author Manuel de Jesus Galván. And before beginning her reading, she spoke a little to her mistress about the novelist, making a point of saying his whole name and never just his surname; and she saw that whenever she pronounced the name ‘Jesus’, her visitor shrank back and his eyes shone with a mixture of fury and fear. Elena came to suspect something that had, for a long time, seemed unimaginable, and as she read the book, she invented a very brief dialogue, in which she had Enriquillo address an inferior in these terms: ‘Hey, you, Jesus, guajiro .’ The ghost covered his eyes in terror for a moment, utterly shaken. Elena did not insist and the man regained his composure.
    Elena kept back her final test for another three days. Her mistress was growing weaker, but she nonetheless refused to stay in bed and sat in her armchair as if that sign of health would be a safeguard against death. And Elena expressed an interest in The Travels of Marco Polo , or so she said, because, in fact, what really interested her was the prologue and the biographical note about the traveller. She introduced a few words of her own, saying: ‘This great adventurer travelled to China and to Mecca, among other places.’ She stopped, and feigning surprise, added: ‘Imagine that, Señora, what a long journey, all the way to China and to Mecca.’ The man’s tanned weather-beaten face turned deathly pale and, at the same time and without transition, how can we put it, his entire figure abruptly vanished, as if that ashen pallor had erased him from the air, made him transparent, a nothing, invisible even to her. And then she was sure that the man was Emiliano Zapata, murdered in his thirties by the treachery of a supposed zapatista called Jesus Guajardo, in a place called Chinameca, or so the legend goes. And she felt very honoured to think that she was being visited by the ghost of Zapata, his clothes still full of the holes made by those treacherous bullets.
    Her mistress died the next morning. Elena stayed on in the house, and for a few days, saddened and disoriented, with no reason to continue, she stopped reading. The young man did not appear. And then, convinced that Zapata wanted to have the education he had doubtless lacked in life, and persuaded by the idea that in his lifetime he had suffered from an excess of reality and for that