179When I first came to Lisbon I used to hear, from the apartment above ours, the sound of scales played on a piano, the monotonous practising of a girl I never actually saw. Today I realise that in the cellar of my soul, by some mysterious process of infiltration, those scales persist, audible if the door below is opened, played over and over by the girl who is now someone else, a grown woman, or dead and enclosed in a white place where verdant cypresses blackly wave.