ALEJANDRO

The portrait

Thirty-four years old and a body that's lean and hard, not an ounce to spare: not from a gym, from the trade. He moves slowly, as if the world could wait for him to finish. What defines him most are the eyes: black, with a quiet insolence, able to hold the longest silence without blinking. On his wrist, half hidden under the cuff of his jacket, a frayed red cord his grandmother tied there when he was a boy. So you don't get lost.

The soul

A man who puts the world in order so he doesn't have to feel it. He counts the tiles on the wall, always eighteen, lines up the cup with the edge of the saucer, empties one sugar packet and half of another, three turns of the spoon, not one less. Order calms him because numbers are the only thing that doesn't change its story. Son of a military man of the old school, who taught him that a man is worth the order he carries out and that affection is rationed like mess-hall food, in measured doses. He has never disobeyed anything that mattered. And his life splits in two the night he discovers that looking a little too long at a man, in a bar, doesn't make him feel guilty: it makes him feel awake.

The appeal

Restraint. He's the man who doesn't touch, and that's why he burns. A quiet masculinity, elegant without trying, whose desire is read in what he arranges and not in what he says. He's spent his whole life without once looking at anyone; when he does, he looks with all the intensity stored up in that wait. What he puts in order with his hands is the only thing he won't allow himself to do with them.

The name

In 2001, the House he works for still signed as CESID; in 2002 it became the CNI. This novel calls it the CNI, the name you'll recognize, and not the one from back then. A small, deliberate anachronism: one of the few the story allows itself.

Light and shadow