Juan Goytisolo (born 6 January, 1931), in a photograph made in the late 1970s
‘You had been asleep and as soon as you opened your eyes you sat up. The clock showed ten minutes to seven. On the marble table there was a bottle of wine and on the porch you could hear the first notes of Mozart’s Requiem, majestic and grave. You looked for Dolores, but Dolores was not there. You could have drunk some Fefinanes, cool and yellow, just the right thing to moisten your lips and you did not decide. The clouds had gone away while you were asleep and the sun was burning up the late sky. Leaning on the railing you contemplated the domesticated hills girded with vines and carob trees, the birds splitting the thin transparency of the air, the distant sea with muffled waves, softened and embellished by the distance. All you had to do was turn your head and take in with one glance the slim cypresses in the garden, the conclave of sparrows perched on the boughs of the cedar tree, the toys forgotten by Dolores’s nieces and nephews when they went off after some new and absurd distraction. (You remembered their winged appearance the night before, solemnly dressed up in two chasubles they had got from the chapel when the servant girl had been careless for a moment, delicate and agile, slightly sacrilegious, with dissipated and smiling faces that had filled you with rapture.)’
—from Marks of Identity (first published in 1966; translated from the Spanish in 1969 by Gregory Rabassa)
