"I would have liked to have warned Tony not to come around here," Bravo said. He uses the pluperfect of the subjunctive, Renzi thought. He was so tired these were the kind of thoughts that popped into his head, thoughts once typical for him, when he was in college and he used to spend his time analyzing grammatical forms and verbal conjugations. Sometimes he wouldn't understand what people were telling him because he'd get distracted analyzing syntactical structures as if he were a philologist enraged by the distorted uses of contemporary language. Recently it has been happening less frequently to him. But sometimes, when he was with a women and he liked her way of speaking, he'd suddenly want to sleep with her because he was so excited by her use of the perfect preterit indicative. As if the presence of the past in the present justified just about any passion."