All the time that we had sat at the café we had not said a word about Nini, as if we had forgotten how he used to like to sit crosswise on his chair and smoke and talk, propping his chin up on one hand and running the other through the lock that fell across his forehead. It was harder and harder to remember the way he looked and the things he used to say, and it frightened me to think of him now that he had receded far into the distance and become one of the vast multitude of the dead.