Gonzalo Torne

Divorce Is in the Air

To Judit,

What could be a finer thing to live with than a high spirit attuned to softness?

I know well

You are not infallible

And how your pony’s eye darkened larger

— TED HUGHES

~ ~ ~

We went to the spa to save what was left of our damned marriage.

With only that goal in mind, I climbed into the driver’s seat of the rented red Citroën, its gear stick so hard to handle it could have run us off the road any second, and I got down to negotiating the curvy road under the vigilant gaze of those medieval towns that in Catalonia sprout from the hills like giant stone mushrooms.

The mountains were gathered into soft crests, and the arid landscape sloped gently down into fields of rye and wheat. We drove along a road still slippery after a storm that had forced us to hole up for hours in a service station, where Helen’s parents had dropped two hundred euros on souvenirs.

The afternoon was warm, as if a touch of April had been mixed in with November, which for its part was still sloughing off poplar leaves into the rushing Corb River. It was oddly disheartening to watch the water’s muddy surface bucking like the back of a live animal as it flowed through the riverbed’s ravines and around its twists and turns. According to the map we were less than five kilometers away. As we rounded an unexpectedly wide bend that opened to our right, I could see Helen in the passenger-side mirror, chewing on the nail of her index finger, her blue gaze fixed on the cigarette she was holding out the window so the smoke wouldn’t annoy her father. The boy in the backseat chewing gum couldn’t hide the fact that, with the set of his cheeks and the generous cut of his lips, he was a more stylized and robust combination of the genes of Helen’s parents, who sat on either side of him. The highway narrowed into a road that dipped toward a wooded area, and I heard the luggage start bouncing in the trunk.

When the tortured river crossed the car’s path again, we drove over a bridge and came to the end of a ribbon of earthen road edged by tall, decorative trees that offered no shade. It led to the imposing manor house the local government had raised from ruin to turn the place into a health spa.

I parked on a stretch of gravel near a square swimming pool devoid of swimmers and a terrace with rustic tables and plastic chairs. I took my small suitcase from the trunk, and while Helen’s parents organized their sacks and bags, American items, and the knickknacks they’d bought as gifts, I looked out over the waves of grain that yellowed the mountains. In the distance I saw irrigation canals lined with sheds that might have housed animals. Before Helen — harassed by the boy and his curiosity — could start nagging me to help her with the giant suitcase she’d brought from Montana, I was startled by the movement of a toad bouncing in and out of the weeds, leaping like a viscous green heart. From every balcony hung a pot of pink dianthus.

We unloaded the car and I let Helen go ahead with her parents and the kid; I needed to stretch my legs before checking in. Here and there, pale patrons strolled. I noticed one jaunty figure in a robe, fanning itself; it greeted me by doffing its hat. The head was shaved but there was a dusting of fuzz, like mocha sprinkles clinging to the skull. The most exciting thing on the terrace was watching the treetops absorb the light, so I headed inside to have a look around.

Helen and family were waiting in line at the other end of a large hall decorated with chandeliers and shelves where porcelain jars were displayed: pennyroyal, verbena, sarsaparilla, and other herbs. I was greeted by an obese woman with a web of varicose veins that seemed to be barely holding the flesh of her shanks in place. When she flashed me a sexless smile I averted my eyes. My soul sank when I noticed the glass wall that gave onto the exercise room beyond: some old people were swimming, frog-like, and others were struggling to flap their arms to the rhythm set by an instructor.

I saw one woman with skin so covered in yellow spots she seemed to be rusting, and a guy so overexerting himself it looked like he was swelling with helium; at any moment his face could have burst. I couldn’t imagine why they would submit to those sadistic exercises, what kind of promises they’d been made. Were they hoping to strengthen their hearts, make their skin less parchment-like, unclog their intestines? After seventy years of wear and tear, wasn’t it enough that they were still standing?

I’d driven over two hours from the Claris hotel in a cramped car with barely enough room to change gears; my knees hurt and hunger was starting to gnaw. I surveyed the tables to see if they were serving snacks with the drinks, and it was then I saw a black boy of twelve or so swoop across the room like a breath of fresh air, zigzagging among the chairs, his arms stretched wide. I figured he’d left something in his room and had turned himself into a flying creature to go back and get it. I was happy for him: kids with imagination are never alone. What made me saddest for Helen’s kid was that, when it came to make-believe, his head was all dried up. He’d just sit there in the hotel rooms looking at me like an idiot. I know it wasn’t an easy situation, but I’m sure his father had introduced him to one or two substitute mothers back in Montana, and for a clever boy three days should be long enough to adapt and to stop being paralyzed every time he laid eyes on me. Anyway, I look more WASPy than any of those Midwestern farmers, so he should have felt right at home.

I searched for a black-skinned adult among the bathers emerging from the water, their hair in clumps like starfish hitched to their heads. Then I looked at the sedated mummies deliberating between ordering a cup of tea and tempting a heart attack, and I finally caught sight of a long finger, dark like damp velvet, hovering over one of the tables. In his yellow shirt the man looked like a spot of India ink in human form. He was focused on pouring milk into his tea, which he did so slowly it curdled into a milky brain that he dissolved with two stirs of the spoon. I like black people, and although I’d never actually met one before, my feelings toward them were warm. I love how flexible their bodies are, though I think it’s probably their skeletons that keep them from being good swimmers — too much cartilage. The one at the spa was an impressive specimen. From his trunk sprouted legs and arms so long it looked like he could kick or pick up any object in the room without even rising from his chair. I must have been standing there admiring him awhile, because when our gazes locked, the eyes floating in his sockets were hard.

I turned my head and saw Daddy dragging the suitcases and his feet down the corridor; only in the occasional gesture could you intuit the lion he’d been, still alive somewhere inside that disintegrating body. Helen’s mother followed a half-meter behind him, enveloped in a cloud of cosmetics. She and I were never exactly going to get cozy: the two occasions we’d been alone together she spent the whole time chewing English words into a mush that sounded Gaelic. In any case, the next day they’d be getting on a plane and vanishing from my life.

When I turned back, Helen was alone at the counter. I picked up her suitcase and let her go ahead with the key.

I love hotel rooms. They play such an important role in how a couple’s relationship develops: I adore those prologues and counterpoints to domestic sex, the injection of the clandestine. But I had spent the whole car trip feeling only apathy when I imagined the moment we’d be left alone in our room, and I didn’t know how my libido was going to respond after five months of separation. It seems supernatural, the way girls swell up and bulge out to become copies of their mothers. I’d spent the day with the flabby version of Helen’s pink and lively body, its soft, damp folds blurred in oily protuberances, and it hadn’t exactly been stimulating.

I got over that foolishness when I saw the way her shape (so full of vitality it always seemed the life would just come spilling out of her) climbed the stairs, managing to carry my small suitcase without losing the side-to-side sway of her hips. The whole time we’d been married that shimmy was all it took to make the voices in my head quit their absurd, disjointed chatter and join together in a chorus to demand a single thing: the very thing we were about to spend the next half hour doing.

Helen couldn’t get the door open so I unlocked it, glancing surreptitiously at the surely creaky bed. We left the suitcases on the floor. A joke of a desk, a full-length mirror, a window displaying vistas of fir trees, and a bathroom with a shower stall. Helen started doing Jovanotti-style calisthenics, and the sight of the translucent down sprouting under her arm had me poised and about to dive in, but right then the boy barged into the room blaring like a trumpet, and I plopped down into a chair instead. The kid should have been off playing in the corridor; indignation crept up from my belly.

“You’re sitting down? You’re not going to help me unpack?”

Despite the sharp edges of her shoddy Spanish, I knew she said it with the best of intentions, without a trace of reproach. She must have felt a bit dazed after that two-hour trip cooped up with Daddy; in her voice there was even a hint of tenderness she’d dredged up from who knows where. She was trying her best, for both our sakes.

“Nagging already. We’re off to a bad start.”

Helen slowly turned, and for a split second she froze in a posture and angle that allowed a simultaneous view of her breasts and gluteus, and I caught myself savoring the sight. I knew her too well not to recognize the tide of indignation swelling in her light eyes. She had to choke something thick down her throat before calling her very sweetest vocal cord into action.

“Don’t worry about it, John. I’ll just wash my hands and then unpack.”

She turned her back to me and went into the bathroom.

“You must be exhausted.”

The boy stared at me for a few seconds and then stood on tiptoe to gaze out the window. I could see my legs in the full-length mirror, and I heard the sound of the shower. Helen was hoping to wash away the unexpected sting of my words; she might be a while. The minibar was right there, I took two little bags of nuts.

And I won’t deny that I had already heard Helen turn off the shower and slide open the latch when I bellowed:

“Are you ever coming out of there?”

The last syllables coincided with Helen’s entrance, wrapped in a towel knotted over her breasts, and I watched her face move through a series of furious contortions before it settled on a petulant expression. I tried to get hold of myself. Before we got to the kissing and biting, we’d have to try to heal the wounds of our most recent year of living together. Even a woman like Helen, almost indecently aware of the upper hand her figure gave her, could forget about her body for two hours and focus on fixing her emotional dissatisfaction.

She merely smiled, rubbed her hands together, started humming and removing feminine accessories from her bag, as if she had two children in her care and not one. I refrained from chiding her for the water she was dripping all over the floor. That’s the kind of generosity you get no credit for, since no one ever notices. The boy joined in her song; it was a trick too old to work, but it was friendly, cordial. I decided to speak to her plainly.

“Don’t you think it’s time the boy went to see his grandparents? You and I need a little privacy.”

The sun was falling like a red coin. I squinted, and the fields of mature wheat looked like thousands of anemones waving underwater.

“They’ll be calling us to dinner soon. There’s no time. And his name is Jackson.”

Helen, too, knew how to read the intentions in the whites of my eyes, to interpret the quick changes in my expressions. That’s what living together is all about: you learn to read the other person’s face like a proverbial open book. I started to take clothes out of my suitcase and scatter them around, marking my territory. But I recognized the taunting tone in Helen’s voice: she knew perfectly well what she was doing to me.

“Plus, we came here to feel like a family, not like lovers.”

I suppose she couldn’t help herself. There’s something so entertaining about setting all the wheels in motion and seeing what happens next. I stretched my legs; even though my feet hurt, I wasn’t about to take my shoes off in front of that little envoy from Helen’s other world. But if she thought the kid was going to make me keep my mouth shut, she was wrong.

“Don’t give me that shit. You just won’t take the time.”

They’d turned on the lights out over the terrace. The grass called to mind the hide of a frightened animal, the red dots of the poppies heavy as blood. No getting around it: night was falling.

I don’t remember Helen saying anything in reply. It was the boy who let out a rat-like screech as his mother dragged him from the room by his arm. She had thrown some clothes on, I didn’t notice what. Once I was alone I took off my shoes and even my socks and tossed back a little bottle of gin. The tables on the terrace had emptied. I could hear the faint chugging of a motor. It was all so calm it felt possible to dispel the darkness with a puff of air. The old folks must have scurried inside when it started to drizzle, and the cool was keeping them hidden away in their rooms.

The night was a blue clear enough that I could see the tree branches as they clapped together. The gin burned the walls of my throat but slid through my veins with benign warmth, softening the contours of the absurd scene I’d found myself in. I felt the tingling of a gentle impatience begin to move over my back and hands; really, it wasn’t half bad.

“There. I left him with his grandparents. Happy?”

When I saw the way her wet hair was regaining its golden hue almost strand by strand, when I watched as she turned and dripped (more) water on the floor, wearing those sweat pants and a dizzyingly vulgar top she’d thrown on, the folds of my heart, shriveled and blackened during that damned car ride, flooded with a warmth somehow tied to being married and living together. I was drenched in an excellent mood. I wanted to take her into my arms, taste her right there from her forehead to the pulp of her buttocks, pull her hair and tickle her, all more or less at the same time.

Helen stayed in profile. She was still chewing the remnants of her rage, but finally she choked them down.

“Sometimes I don’t know what to do with Jackson either. Everything will be different once the three of us are living together.”

“That’s if we can fix our relationship first.”

I tried to reel the words back in. It’s a shame that sound waves don’t have a tail I could have grabbed hold of before they crossed the space between us and rearranged themselves into linguistic information inside the prodigious maze of Helen’s inner ear.

The months we’d spent apart had been long. We certainly weren’t starting from scratch, but plenty of our knee-jerk responses had grown stiff from underuse. I know there are people whose moods can change if you just know the right words to use on them. Helen wasn’t like that, though — she was dragged along by her emotions. So I was left openmouthed at her submissive reply, the step she took to get past her grievance.

“Of course, we have to fix things between us first. Sorry, that’s what we’re here for.”

The bathroom mirror answered our silence with a fluorescent shine; it was like a round of applause. She smiled at me before pulling her hair back into a ponytail and wringing it out, drops of water falling to the floor. There’s something funny about sparring against the same lips, jaw, arms, and hips that you’ve caressed as they rocked above you in different beds. Having that body right there when you finally break through the cloud of an argument is one of the true comforts of marriage. I took her by the shoulders, but she pretended a pair of stockings was falling and ducked away. When she stood up she smiled at me again, but it wasn’t a clean smile. I felt privileged to be the only living mammal able to precisely interpret that cooling of her gaze. Her spirit wasn’t calm, the dregs of her anger were still sloshing around inside her. She took a step backward to inspect me.

“You eat too much, John. You’re heavy.”

Helen sank onto the mattress, changing position deftly in mid-air to end up with one leg crossed under her other thigh. I think it speaks well of me that I never confused Helen with a kitten, with some creature bred for confinement. We were in the early stages of something, and it didn’t bode well that neither one of us had any idea how it would end.

“Come again?”

“You’re getting fat. You have to take care of yourself. Tall people don’t wear extra pounds well. Plus, you don’t have the kind of face for a bag of skin at your neck.”

“It’s called a double chin. And why don’t I have the face for a double chin?”

“Because of your eyes, you don’t have clever eyes. Without a well-defined profile your face would look like a balloon, something swollen, an old thing…”

“That’s why I married you, so you’ll take care of me when I’m old.”

I started nonchalantly to undress, going for a purely functional nudity — the air from the radiator was suffocating. I said nothing; when I sucked in my belly, my windpipe was cut off and I started to cough.

“You’re sucking it in. You don’t have a blank check with me, you know. You can forget about me cleaning up your shit if you go and turn into a pig. Spanish women put up with anything: fat guys; bald, hairy, smelly ones….Well, I’m not Spanish.”

“Leave me alone, Freckles. Just try finding someone else you can dump that kid of yours on.”

She jumped up from the bed, evidence that I hadn’t managed to varnish my words with a joking veneer (their doubting undertone probably made things worse). Though I don’t think she entirely understood the Catalan words I used, I know she grasped their general drift. Her eyes darkened, two open holes in pink flesh, and began to dart around the room, scanning the furniture for a hiding place or weapon. She spewed a stream of words, but what she really wanted was to find a way out.

I tried to yell at her to stop, but she charged toward the exit with her hands over her ears, a gesture I’ve always found unbearably childish. In two long strides I was between her and the door. She stopped short of touching me and took two steps backward, her calves tensed. She looked at me, and now there was no hint of circumspection in her eyes; whatever fire had ignited in her wasn’t going to be quenched by talking. It would last all night, and I could forget about touching her now. By some marvel of asymmetry, my head cooled just as Helen was passing the point of no return, a fury mounting in her that couldn’t be stamped out even by apologizing (and I wasn’t about to do that anyway — the final embers of my anger were still smoldering). Helen would only be satisfied once she’d subjected me to a good dose of pain.

“Move.”

“You can’t leave now….”

“Move.”

“I’m not going to let you out.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re going to ruin everything, you’re going to spoil our whole night. Just do me a favor and look at me, listen to me!”

“I don’t want anything to do with you. Let me out or I’ll scream. Move!”

“And what do you think you’re going to do? Hide out in your parents’ room?”

“I’ll leave tomorrow. I can change the plane ticket with Daddy.”

“You’re not serious, you’re talking nonsense. Try to think straight. Don’t be an idiot. You can’t walk out that door.”

“Why are you naked, anyway?”

No matter how intense the argument got, there was always a little light of sanity alive, and now it regained control and the level of rage began to fall. The look in her eyes was, shall we say, tender; she doubled over with laughter. I joined in, and we were on our way out of the mess, taking our first steps through the valley, hand in hand like young lovers.

“You were going to chase me like a naked, stupid balloon all the way down the hall! You wouldn’t get me, I’d never let a dumb bag of nuts catch me.”

Her tone was affectionate enough. Now I only had to absorb the venom; it was nothing I couldn’t bear if I kept my cool. Then we could move on, trusting in the harness of humor. Once we’d shared a smile we would be safe. I could remind her how she always confused cacahuetes with nueces; I could kiss her, squeeze one of her tits, I had the technique down cold. It was just that combination of “bag” and “balloon,” the clear, lying impertinence of her slapdash attack…I felt my tantrum rearing back up.

“You’ve done it again, Helen. Once again, you are incomprehensible. I can feel the rotten energy you give off when you sink into vulgarity.”

Even though I was down to my boxers, fine drops of sweat began to break out on my forehead. I was euphoric. Helen was a miracle of human strength: in just a few months she’d regained the desire to fight and to reconcile her life with me, adiós, pills, good-bye, self-indulgence. She was overflowing with greed, crafty calculation, and the desire for a good time, all the essential components of the human spirit. I convinced myself I had the argument under control, I knew what I had to say to get a smile out of her so we could leap free of that oppressive atmosphere of aggression. But only a saint can listen to his own mollifying voice while his mind spins in a chaos of fierce emotion. Plus, I was teaching her a lesson, and I was enjoying it.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if all that rage has burst a blood vessel. When a doctor cracks open your skull he’ll find that your thoughts have been fermenting in a brain soaked in blood…I don’t care if I’m shouting! I’m not yelling just to yell, I have a good reason! I need to be able to hear myself think when I’m fighting with you.”

I heard the crash, I saw the pieces on the floor, but it took me a second to compose a mental image of what had broken. She still hadn’t slipped from my grasp; it was in her best interests to go on loving me. Sooner or later the terrifying combination of her lack of drive plus Jackson would bring her back to my side, but when I saw how she was writhing like a creature in a trap, the hair along my spine stood on end.

“Asshole, bastard.”

“You should shut up.”

“Bastard, bastard, asshole. Let me out.”

“At least lower your voice, they’ll hear us.”

“What do I care!”

She leapt at me, she hit my chest, the tip of a fingernail pierced my skin. I don’t know how I got her off me. I must have grabbed her by the shirt because when she threw herself backward, the cloth tore. She covered her breasts with her hands and her face turned red as if there were fire in her veins. She stayed there with her fleshy lips open around the hole she chewed and breathed through. I tried, but I couldn’t muster a single gesture of affection. Quite the opposite, in fact: I started to laugh. I hope the memory of pointing my finger at her is false.

“I hate you.”

She picked up her shoulder bag and heaved it toward the window. A half-meter higher and it would have fallen to the patio below. She ripped apart a pillow before storming into the bathroom and slamming the door behind her. I heard the lock, and the sound of the taps in the shower and the sink. I dropped onto the sheets, my legs trembling.

“Come out of there! You’re acting like a crazy woman! You are a rational creature, try to use your brain, you might surprise yourself!”

I turned my head and found my face in the mirror; my hair was plastered down and a spongy, bulging vein disfigured my forehead, but I liked the cut of my shaven jaw. I took the opportunity to fix my hair.

“You’re behaving like a child! Don’t forget you are a mother!”

I was sweating and my pores were wide open. I started scratching my back and armpits. I stood up to inspect my body in the mirror, and I couldn’t see anything flabby about my stomach — she’d said that just to annoy me. I was getting hungry; it’s a good thing trail mix doesn’t get cold. Daddy and the Mrs. would already be getting dressed for dinner at the Hotel Monster. I missed Jackson, he would have calmed things down. Children force you to behave. If someone had told me, when I was his age, that people nearing thirty could behave like Helen and I had in that room, I would have thought they were crazy. Of course, after all that fuss, it wouldn’t exactly be easy to find the right combination of words to ask Helen to bring the kid back.

“Come on now, we can still fix tonight. We’re here to put things right, remember?”

The key was to control my impatience. She couldn’t stay in there forever, and any minute now she’d start to get hungry. I did think she was capable of holding out until dinner started, making the boy or his grandmother come up to look for us. I resisted the sensible urge to get dressed — I was comfortable there on the bed. My anger began to subside; I really didn’t feel like bickering and avoiding each other. I wanted to move on.

“We came here because you wanted to make up, because you got down on your knees and begged me. This was your idea, so you can’t stay in there.”

She turned on the water again, the little fool, when she heard my voice. At least she was in a playful mood.

“It makes no sense to stay in there!”

“No sense at all, unless you’re trying to break some kind of weird record.”

“And I can assure you that this is not the best day to play with world records.”

She opened the door. She’d managed to find a green dress that clung so tightly to her skin there was no mistaking her for some innocuous maternal figure. She still had that dark look in her eyes, but now the sparks they gave off seemed like stars so distant no one can tell if they’re alive or dead. It was the same gaze I’d woken up to every morning for almost a year, when I would brush the lush blonde hair back from her face to see her eyes, which were like screens where I could watch a sequence of slippery emotions flicker while I waited for one of them to coalesce. That emotion, though, didn’t tend to favor me. Helen was confused. Back when we first started living together, before she was corrupted from the inside by the combined effect of our shared present and the memories of her youth with Daddy, I could always hope she’d start crying. It was uncomfortable to see her breaking inside, but the tears had their advantages. They left her empty and clean, like a white wall on which we could start to write again.

“You’re hateful. I’m trying my best, I’m putting all my energy into this.”

Then she turned that gaze on me, like a curved spoon that scooped effortlessly under my skin, as if to check the ripeness of the pulp inside. I’ve never found a defense against her drive to discover my worst aspects. I had an attack of modesty and yanked off the sheet to cover myself, to take shelter from her scrutiny. It didn’t occur to me that I was breaking a basic rule of cohabitation, even if we were in a hotel.

“You messed up the bed!”

“And why does the bed matter?”

“You’re a disaster, this plan was stupid, I made a mistake…I’ve been wasting my time. I wouldn’t know how to go back to living together without feeling disgusted.”

Considering that all I’d wanted since the moment I’d gotten into the car was to run away, we should have made our peace and separated there and then. But the argument had altered my objectives, and I was moving along the tracks of a different logic. I wanted to avoid making a scene, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to apologize. I wasn’t by any means ready to give up — I wanted to win every which way.

“Shut up! I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to sit there until you calm down, and when you’re finished getting dressed you will once again be a normal person. Then we’ll talk.”

“You’re still naked.”

This time it wasn’t a joke. She realized a second before I did that lying on the bed like that, I wouldn’t have time to block her exit, and I wouldn’t be capable of following her down the corridor in my underwear. She left the room.

“You don’t have the nerve!”

Maybe back then I was caught unawares that her brain, which normally needed fifteen minutes to assimilate any new idea, was able to calculate so many possibilities so quickly. Now I know that when the situation calls for it, the brain sends out nervous commands to the muscles without troubling the conscious mind, and the mind only asks for explanations once the flesh and its precious functions are safe and sound. After our little drive, being left alone wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I was fixated on bringing her back. I left the remaining words to orbit the center of my rage until they burned up; the only indispensable thing was to find some pants and a shirt.

I went out without closing the door, without grabbing the key. I went out without checking the time: night had fallen, and only the promenade lights and the blue rectangle of the pool were shining.

I felt my way down the stairs, my legs shaking. Helen could be anywhere. From the corridor I could see the waiters toiling away with silverware and tablecloths before dinner. I was horrified at the sight of a stage with three microphones set up, ready for an hour or so of musical torment. I preferred not to imagine the food they’d be serving those used-up bodies, with their desiccated lungs and missing prostates: boiled potatoes, steamed fish…I thought I saw my mother-in-law’s expansive backside, but I didn’t hang around to make sure — there was no way Helen would choose to make a scene in front of her parents rather than humiliate me with a spectacular disappearance. I’d have bet our three years together that she’d left the building, and I only had to guess the direction she’d taken. I put my hand in my pocket to be sure I’d brought provisions: the second bag of peanuts and those other, bigger nuts — cashews, I think.

I went out to the terrace and wavered between heading for the forest to the left or the fields to the right. I stood there deliberating while my pupils adjusted to the dark and my nose detected that smell of tender wheat. At least I could see my own hands.

“She went toward the woods.”

The voice came from one of the tables, and I recognized the androgynous face of that obese woman, the smile with its faint flirtatiousness. Out in the civilian world those bands of blubber act as insulation against desire. Those decades (twenties, thirties, forties) in which fat women are not really alive socially must seem long. I felt bad for her, although she looked delighted to find that age was tarring everyone else with the same brush. Anyway, I liked that her crystal ball was directing me away from the farm, where earlier I’d heard the unmistakable grunting of pigs — those animals have given me the willies ever since I was a child. If you ask me, it does nothing for their reputations that their heart tissues are compatible with ours.

“She seemed pretty angry.”

I liked it less that the woman had noticed Helen and connected her to me. Of course, I couldn’t hold it against her. A health farm full of mummies isn’t exactly the best place to enjoy a little privacy; Helen and I looked like we’d just stepped out of a time machine.

“Walk to the bar, then follow the light. If she hasn’t crossed the river she can’t get lost.”

I sped up. Though I hadn’t ruled out strangling her once I found her, I also hadn’t considered the danger a swampy channel posed to an overexcited woman.

I took two steps and brought a couple of peanuts to my mouth. A breeze carried the scent of the dianthus hanging from the balconies, and it was as if for a few seconds I’d stepped outside the loathsome circle of triviality I was trapped in. What was I trying to prove? Our marriage was an undeniable disaster, and even if we somehow managed to bring some equilibrium to our erratic behavior, what sort of future would I have with a Helen desperate to protect her body against gravity’s effects? All that siliconed humanity (paid for by whom?) encasing Helen’s hysterical and paranoid voice, lording it over my little world of pills, secret stashes of food, naps, scarves, and hands that shook as I shaved. If now, when I could still scare her with my bare hands, I was out searching for her and trembling from cold and nerves and fear, what resistance would I have against her tyrannical impulses once my manhood had withered away? When, even if I wiggled free of all the orthopedic gear, I’d still spend my days negotiating among hearing aids, routine doctor’s visits, soft cereals, and heart surgeries?

Two bats fluttered past while I was entertaining the thought that I deserved a woman of better character, but then I shook off my self-indulgence. When it came down to it, we were all barreling toward old age at the speed of time, and Helen was the girl I wanted. And — why deny it — a large cross-section of my molecules was enjoying the unexpected surges of adrenaline the night had provided so far.

Through the glass wall I could see the black man at the hotel bar, holding what I guessed was a gin and tonic. The window was so dark it was hard to make out his skin; it was like his yellow shirt and the glass he held were floating in space. I couldn’t say why, but I felt heartened when the guy peered out at me from his gloomy fish tank, as if he were attaching me by an invisible thread to the world of sanity, far from the bitter sphere where Helen and I screeched like two lunatics. It seemed like he was pointing me in the right direction. I made a gesture of thanks that was quite eloquent — though with black people, who knows? — and I took off toward the forest at a trot, like a soldier on a mission. The peanuts made themselves known, bilious, in my stomach.

I had to cross a narrow canal in a no-man’s-land between the pool and the woods. The only light came from the sliver of raw-metal moon that hung in the sky beside a single amethyst-colored star. I felt a gust of wind; somehow in the villages it always blows coldly. I started to walk through the bushes. Here and there I came across cans and bottles and dirty newspapers — those old folks were real slobs. It wasn’t long before I reached the Corb River, blanketed by the stench of moldering vegetation. The light barely reached the opposite bank, and the currents shone and flowed over a mass of shadows. Near where the forest grew free of human intervention I could distinguish bubbles of greenery. I knew I’d find her any minute. It wasn’t Helen’s style to run around barefoot in the dark in a ditch. I was promising myself I would flatten her skull before I’d let her cross that river, when another damn bat came at me. It took half a minute to get rid of the rodent, but the fear was still in me when I came to a stretch where the river flowed luminously. The water reflected spotlights hung in the trees, presumably so any old codgers who decided to take a little midnight stroll wouldn’t end up at the bottom of the river. It looked like a miniature city had sunk right there, the lights still shining underwater. Right at the water’s edge I recognized Helen’s shape, trampling clumps of weeds: her figure tensed, her head bent, a living ghost. She looked unsteady and I took two long strides to catch her before she slid. I guess I must have forgiven her — if now I’m regretting not pushing her, it’s only because I know the last dirty trick she still had up her sleeve.

Believe me, I know very well what I’m saying here, I’m not just speculating, I’m no fortune-teller. One night two weeks ago I woke up at three in the morning, my mind addled, startled awake by the raw feelings that surprise us when our psychic defenses are down. I never even opened my eyes, but I flailed my arm over the sheet. I must have moved out of my usual area while I was sleeping, because I touched the cold left side of the bed where you never lie, where Helen used to be. It was that discomfiting feeling that made me think back more than ten years — the fifteen or twenty that have passed since I’ve seen Helen. So this is not a present-day report, this is only a story: my story with Helen, my story without you.

Only a couple of weeks ago, when I finally convinced myself that you’d left for good and weren’t coming back, that you might not even be reading my e-mails and were probably letting my messages languish in voice mail limbo, I made an annoying discovery: over the past five years, the friendships we’d begun at my initiative would fit on half a page. I had fewer than two hundred contacts on Facebook, and I didn’t even know how many of them were in the country. I accept every friend request I get: there are always people who give themselves odd pseudonyms, I have a bad memory, I don’t like to offend anyone, and you never know what contacts will be useful. So many people get brushed off unremarked from our lives like old hairs. If I had more time I’d find a better metaphor: old hairs are washed away but these guys stick around, starring in their own lives, with good or bad memories of us, a couple of out-of-date phone numbers, the blurred memory of our faces and some residual goodwill. In sum, files no one ever expects to reopen.

I turned to the social network in the hope it would revolutionize my single life — I couldn’t be seen with anyone contaminated by “us.” But the only thing I got (other than ads for cars, drinks, and insurance) was one dose of the past after another: people from La Salle, from ESADE, my sister’s friends. I was uncomfortable about returning to my school days. Sure, it had been a great time: the basketball games when everything goes your way, an unforgettable girlfriend, dinners to be framed and hung on the wall, parties it hurt to leave. But life must be lived in the present, it’s too wide and intense a terrain to let yourself go astray. So what are a bunch of big, forty-something boys — mature, healthy, and virile — doing digging into the past (so recent!) to find buddies who’d most likely been left behind for good reason?

I hardly went beyond the first greeting in my renewed friendships. I didn’t comment on people’s photos, didn’t update my status, and my only public photo was that close-up of you on a Neapolitan street, with your dark hair and an otherworldly smile, a photo you never let me show anyone — you were always so ashamed of your charm. And if I exchanged three or four messages with Pedro-María, it wasn’t out of any particular affection. It certainly wasn’t because, after I accepted his friend request, he wrote on his wall that he had finally gotten his best friend back — a phrase that made me gag. Rather, it was a conscious first step in my quest for experiences washed clean of you. I chose Pedro-María because, in spite of his enthusiasm, he was a fairly negligible burden: the emotional impact of seeing him again was pretty close to zero.

Our friendship had grown from a fertile soil of coincidences. It was my first year in Barcelona and, while we were waiting with our parents in the line of kids waiting to be distributed in classes, my mother told Pedro’s she thought we would become good friends. Mother was trying to help, to do whatever it took to give me my first friend, but the only reason I sat next to him was because we ended up with a teacher who arranged us by height rather than alphabetically. What a guy, Father Margarine. He always knew when you were silently mocking him, as if his eyes could cut right through your skull and read the words swirling inside. He used to tell me I would never amount to anything, and there was a time in my younger days when I’d have loved to track him down and give him a detailed rundown of my love life. But he’d be long dead by now. It’s crazy how those guys who were fifty when we were kids have all keeled over. Anyway, what would I have to boast about these days?

It was also because of our height that both Pedro and I were recruited for basketball, and three days a week, after practice and showers, we went home together while our mothers chattered about unfathomable feminine matters. If we were lucky they’d buy us a Swiss roll covered in cream and crowned with a cherry. And since I helped him with his math homework, and he got my technical drawings into a passable state, our classmates and teachers assumed we were closer than we really were. Actually, I distanced myself from him every chance I got. I was a vigorous kid, lively, the golden boy who always landed on his feet. And Pedro…well, Pedro was too skinny and angular, and I was never sure he had a motor of his own. He seemed content to feed off the surplus energy of another heart that had entered the world overflowing with vital juices. It was absurd that the powers above had bestowed a whole life on such a weak spirit. If you think about it, the house of our friendship was built from the materials supplied by my mother’s pushiness, Father Margarine’s idiosyncrasy, and a sport that favored the tall: all told, a shack of straw and reeds. How can you miss someone who’s been carried away on the wind of the years?

And now we come to my second motive: when I gave Pedro my mobile number, I was so miserable I would’ve thrown myself into a grave if its diggers could guarantee me in writing a bit of human company. But don’t start gloating just yet. Aside from your ignominious departure, something else was weighing on me: my stupendous health was starting to fail.

A fairly Siberian day had encroached on Barcelona’s climate. I was heading down Calle Muntaner, too furious to take shelter in a taxi. I’d just visited my mother, and if asking to borrow money once you’re over forty is already more debasing than at twenty (it’s harder to convince yourself the situation is temporary and things will soon get better), I can assure you it’s even worse when you’re given the runaround in reply. I’d found my mother livelier than usual, and the cause for her sudden euphoria — a newfound group of septuagenarian friends — should have made me happy. I was surprised, of course, but I didn’t waste my time inquiring about her new companions. I was too busy fuming over her refusal to advance me what I needed to avoid descending yet another rung down the proverbial ladder.

“Let’s talk about it in two weeks. I’m sure I’ll have an answer for you by then.”

I called my sister and got her voice mail, but it wouldn’t let me leave a single message; I called six times and was charged for each of them. I wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf, and I went into one of those Pakistani or Brahmin shops that don’t pay taxes and will be the only kind of business to survive after the imminent crisis has devoured all the rest: the shops selling collectible stamps, the bookstores, tailors, and all the fine liquor stores. Who knows, maybe you ran off with a Syrian, but I’ll have to watch as the Eixample’s diverse commercial landscape simplifies into a bunch of yucca dispensaries, hotels, outlets, Chinese wholesale shops, and Internet cafés that smell like feet. I bought a big bag of chips — kettle-cooked, 2.35 euros — telling myself I needed the energy. I searched all my pockets, hoping to avoid breaking my fifty-euro note.

The fabulous power of saturated fats propelled me home, which obviously is no longer the charming apartment in Diagonal Mar I can’t afford without you. Now I have a low-ceilinged matchbox stuck on top of a building with no elevator and no central heating, where I moved because the landlord (a friend Vicente met in rehab) agreed to let me pay the deposit of 1,200 euros over three months, which are up next week. Also because, like an idiot, I bought into the romance of the word “attic,” even though the place faces inward and the living room windows look onto an alley featuring trash cans and the fluorescent lights of the Adam sauna, whose main service you can well imagine.

Calle Rocafort is half an hour from the beating heart of the Gayxample, and the common species around here is the old lady walking a repulsive dog that will start to lick your shoes and trouser leg if you don’t cross the street; even so, the Adam is packed to the gills every Friday. It can’t hope to attract the queer VIPs that flock to Barcelona from northern Europe looking for easy sex or streets where they can walk openly hand in hand. But the Adam has no competition for the closeted flamers from Sants and La Bordeta, from dramatic Creu Coberta or that strange neighborhood that opens up as the Gran Via breaks away from Paral-lel (a street that in any other city would be called Perpendicular), so the managers have a guaranteed full house every weekend.

And while I juggle things so I can pay the VAT, the land tax, the water bill, the taxes for parking, garbage collection, and weed trimming in those neighborhood parks that only depress me the second I think of walking through them…not to mention the indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and gas…all that municipal reverse dialysis that sucks the clean blood from my bank account and replaces it with an infusion of debt and requests for payment…while I try to stop them cutting off my electricity, or the water (full of lead particles and other carcinogens), I’m sure the folks at the Adam don’t have to cough up even half. Those fairies function like a mafia of mutual support — forget about the heart’s network of capillaries, that crowd is all irrigating each other. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against dykes and even less against gays. But if on top of letting two-husband couples adopt kids, they get tax breaks to boot, just what do the rest of us get for being normal?

I gathered my courage to climb the stairs. If I hadn’t been ashamed at the thought of eating in front of the peepholes, I would have saved some chips to replenish my energy on the landings. Luckily, I was only two floors up when the pain hit me. It felt like fingers were plucking my nerve endings, pulling them toward the side where I felt my heart beating. I stood stock-still like a rodent surprised by artificial light, repeating “it’s OK, it’s OK.” Some afternoons I go swimming at the local pool, and if I push my body too hard nausea overcomes me when I grab the float to rest. I never thought it was important — my mental life is so tangled there’s bound to be the odd physical repercussion. I realized right away this was more aggressive. It wasn’t just the pain that coiled through my arm, ribs, and throat, leaving a burning wake behind it: what really scared me was the crystal-clear impression, as if my own myocardium were whispering it in my ear, that my heart was suffocating.

Somehow I hailed a taxi, and three blocks before we reached the Quirón hospital the pain started to fade. I ruled out going back home. I know I promised you I’d try to rein in my hypochondria, and no one could deny I’ve stopped confusing headaches with tumors or thinking every red spot is a fermenting melanoma. This time, though, I was sure something truly malignant was afoot in those veins of mine. This was serious; my sweat reeked of adult trauma.

If the universe were a fair place, I would have gotten something out of our separation. My spirit was swirling with enough foul gunk as it was — a scare would have been enough, there was no need for anything so drastic. If the world were at all rational, there would be a cap on suffering. Of course, if there were, Vicente wouldn’t have lost the hearing in his right ear, just like that. He was taking a walk, and suddenly it felt like his inner ear was sucking up all the sound and replacing it with a whistling that didn’t go away at night. The ENT specialist was encouraging: he might recover some of his hearing at any moment, though in the meantime he had to get used to living with tinnitus that kept him awake one in every three nights. They told him it could be caused by an allergy, a virus, the stress they use to explain everything, or a common antibiotic. So Vicente lived like a deaf man until the day he had a migraine that almost knocked him over in the middle of the street. In the hospital they drugged him and handed him off to a specialist who rummaged around in his head with lasers and X-rays until he reached a diagnosis: a benign tumor was growing between Vicente’s inner ear and his brain. They cut it out, because even in all its benignity the lump threatened to damage his temporal lobe. During the operation, with half Vicente’s skull open and his brain propped up in cotton and bloodied gauze, the surgeon slipped and nicked the nerve that regulates facial muscles on Vicente’s left side. He recovered 70 percent of his hearing, and maybe it’s even better now — we don’t see each other too much anymore. For one thing, there’s what he did to me with Helen. For another, it’s pretty off-putting talking to a guy who can’t move half his face. Doctors can go on all they like about odds, but just try telling the people who actually suffer that kind of weird illness. When it happens to you, it’s like you bet the farm on a single hand.

The doctor called me in. He used a remote that looked like a toy to lower the lights and run through slides with graphics and drawings of the heart. While I appreciated the staging — a gold star for public health — I was still too scared to take in the details. The jargon whizzed by and I couldn’t arrange the words into any sort of order, until finally I grasped the secret motive of his spiel: the guy was reprimanding me. He explained that the heart is an organ that cannot store oxygen, which entails — aside from embarrassment for whoever designed the thing — a constant demand for blood to move through the tangled channels of vessels toward our hungry organs. The complexity of the capillary network made me feel a little better about our genetic legacy — hats off to DNA’s handiwork.

My blood flow had been interrupted for half a minute, long enough to give a shock to my senses; a few more minutes and the tensed wall of my heart would have dried into dead tissue. Luckily (oh, so luckily) the flow had stabilized. It was hard to accept that I was actually seeing the inside of my artery, or to understand what it meant that it was only 30 percent clear. The rest was obstructed by a plaque of lipids and fat, cellular or molecular muck — I wasn’t sure which scale we were talking about, or what was really going on inside me, under the skin covering my hands and thighs and ribs.

“It’s like the mixture of hair, soap, and dead skin that clogs up the shower drain.”

This was the example that disgusting man gave me, and I smiled as if I had some familiarity with that filth. If my artery wall hadn’t held up, some member of his class would have sliced through the hairy layers and fat of my chest, then split my sternum with a surgical saw and conducted a life-or-death operation on my aging heart.

“One might say you were lucky.”

You know me, my appetites are basic but clear: I asked for something to eat.

“That’s part of the problem.”

I reacted like a child playing Parcheesi who sees the dice land on the combination that spells his defeat, but waits a few seconds to give reality the chance to backtrack. In the end I took it in, and the explanation was striking: from my myocardium to my pulmonary veins and optic nerves, my entire system was filthy and unstable with the toxic residue of forty years of extravagance.

“We are what we eat. You have to be careful, and the best thing you can do is go on a diet.”

To tell the truth, this doctor inspired confidence: he was around my age, but was the kind of guy who’s already given up on his appearance. With a hairless skull and slack skin over the flesh of his cheeks, his attractiveness was limited to the flashes of intelligence in his expression. But still, I wasn’t about to let him call me “diabetic” and be so pleased about it. That he was a doctor and I had no goddamn idea what I was talking about was neither here nor there — society is democratic now, and you can’t just go around imposing your point of view on people. I decided I’d investigate on my own: Wikipedia and the Discovery Channel. Because I couldn’t make head or tails of the diagnosis. In school we’d always had one or two diabetics: white as marble, shooting up insulin like junkies in training, useless at sports, and condemned to eat peas and cauliflower forever. I was never one of them — you only had to look at me to know that — and no one was going to rewrite my own history.

“It’s adult onset. Your pancreas is deteriorating.”

“You might find yourself getting more tired than normal. You might have nausea or vomiting, and polyphagia, polydipsia and polyuria, and prickling of the skin.”

“Your body will have trouble forming scars if you cut yourself, that’s another problem.”

“You are going to have to take care of yourself, Mr. Miró-Puig.”

Taking care of myself meant giving up, first of all (the doctor had enough empathy to ration the bad news), fried potatoes, nuts (innocent nuts!), sweets, alcohol (the doctor knows that the list of exceptions here will be long), tobacco (I don’t smoke), meat and seafood binges, and bingeing in general (even lettuce has too much carbohydrate): all the things that provide an ounce of bodily pleasure. Sure, he didn’t put a limit on sex, but your departure had left me without an accomplice — though toward the end our bedroom hadn’t exactly been a carnival — and I wasn’t feeling up to finding a girlfriend.

“There’s no cutoff date for this, Joan-Marc. You’re going to have to behave—fer bondat, forever.”

I knew I should be pleased, and not just because he’d moved to a first-name basis, which does make disease less intimidating; my muscle tissue had survived, and 30 percent of the light could still pass through my arteries. We’d caught it in time, problem detected, I was alive and they didn’t even have to slice me up like a chicken. I would go on breathing, and I still had a good thirty-two years or so left.

“It’s not a reversible situation. You’re going to have to say good-bye to certain habits and replace them with healthier ones.”

It was unfair: so many carnivores loose in the streets, so many people who’ve never spent five minutes considering the industrial torture techniques used to fatten up the animals whose cadavers are filleted into their servings of filthy protein. And yet, it’s the conscientious guy who suffers, the guy who’s practically vegetarian and whose worst sin was being a bit greedy when it came to fried tubers and sugary trail mix. It was asking a lot of me to kill the hours between cooked vegetables and a seaweed salad by snacking on tomato slices.

“Some habits must go for good.”

Of course it was bad — terrible — that you’d left me, and that financial worries crowded my doorstep, but it was that visit to the doctor that really brought me to despair. Obviously I rebelled at the prospect of spending the rest of my life watching through a thick pane of glass as steaming plates of delicious fried foods paraded past. But I need more to explain my utter collapse: I stopped writing to you, I stopped pairing my socks, ironing my clothes; I left the house with a slovenly beard and unkempt hair, I wore the same shirt for a week, I forgot to brush my teeth. I found myself sitting down on the toilet like a little girl, sniveling, unable to face my problems. I woke up in the middle of the night, closed my eyes and imagined my heart like a dry bean beating behind my ribs: shriveled, timid, wrinkled. I had attacks of rage while stretched out on the sofa. I lost all confidence in my body. My defenses against hypochondria were peeling off like damp parquet tiles. What would be next? My hands started sweating when I thought about how the consciousness I was so comfortable in, the only point in the whole grand universe where I was capable of living, could just give out at any moment. I got despondent every time I thought about that doughy muscle, coated in blood, beating to the rhythm of instructions screen-printed onto a DNA helix before I left my mother’s womb. It wasn’t only that my arteries were clogged, making me chronically ill in the eyes of Western doctors — after all, if you looked at me with a more discerning eye, I was healthy. My diabetes wasn’t the kind the kids at school had: I could exercise, argue, touch a woman; I would taste meat again. No, the thing that pierced me like a poison arrow was that word: “incurable.”

“Never again.”

I realized I had treated my body as if it were unchanging, and every slight malfunction as reversible; I was sure I could overcome anything with the power of my charm. The problem wasn’t that my youthful vigor had dissipated. Sure, I’ve never been one to spend hours running laps under polluted skies, but soon (as soon as I found an opponent who would pay for the court) I’d be playing tennis again, and no one could stop me from buying a set of dumbbells to turn those (slight) lumps of fat into high-quality muscles. The problem is I’ve started to notice bodily phenomena I never paid attention to before: I look for broken capillaries, I monitor the texture of my skin that yields in lax folds in places that can’t be exercised (cheeks, nape of the neck), the wrinkles that accumulate in the corners overworked by my expressions, the little white spots that spoil my easily tanned complexion…It’s as if youth and vigor were just matter’s fever dreams.

I began to think seriously about things I thought I’d outgrown in adolescence: I spent hours searching online for a way to preserve my mind — all those impressions accumulated over forty-something years of observations and hormone fluctuations — once my organism fell apart. I wore my eyes out staring at the screen for entire nights. It’s a disgrace they still can’t download consciousness to a machine, where it can be preserved until those shady guys doing stem cell research finally figure out how to cultivate host bodies. Surely my unique point of view is worth something, even though the birth rate keeps going up and up year after year. Consciousness is stuck to the cerebral jelly — you can’t separate the two — and it’s lights out once the brain is used up. All this goddamn progress and we still have to break down and die.

“Never again.”

The point is, I didn’t update my Facebook profile so I could contact survivors from a shared past I couldn’t care less about. It was just the first idea I’d had of a way to distract myself from my waning future. And since finding a buddy is less exhausting than looking for a girlfriend, I started prowling through my “friends,” and the “friends” of my “friends.” I was embarrassed to put anything on my wall; unless you run a nightclub or work as a spy, what kind of news can guys like us really come up with? Most had posted photographs full of incipient jowls, those hair implants that only advertise the baldness they’re trying to disguise, age spots, and misshapen blubber. It would have been more elegant if they’d simply vanished after finishing their senior year. Girlfriends, children, wives — it was disheartening to think that by now all my classmates (for the love of God, mere boys) had been baptized in sexual waters.

Pedro-María was divorced, lived in the city, worked for himself, and had free time — it all sounded good. It took us three e-mails to set things up. I boldly proposed a vegan restaurant, but some people just can’t get past the idea of wilted spinach on a plate. He proposed a brasserie in Poblenou and I didn’t protest; my courtesy was stronger than my sense of responsibility as an invalid. I was going to give myself a break.

I spent two days rehearsing speeches that would give the impression of a successful man going through a rough patch — I didn’t have the audacity to hide that — but it got harder and harder as more details of my “temporary” hard time came to light: economic, emotional, health-related. If I was honest about my circumstances, it was easy to confuse me with a newly divorced guy exploiting social networks to vent about his problems. Pedro-María would realize I was at the end of my tether, the kind of guy to be avoided like the plague — that’s me. I couldn’t let that loser humiliate me. If he thought I was going to be his doormat, he was sorely mistaken.

The day wasn’t terribly cold but I ruled out walking. The 54 bus left me on Gran Via, and from there I left behind the regularity of the Eixample for the delirium of Poblenou: its sloping streets, underground walkways, little village houses and rashes of modern buildings; its stairways, blind alleys, and kilometers of warehouses sporting broken windows. I got lost twice; luckily I’d left with time to spare.

While I was trying to find my way, I thought back to how alone I’d felt on my first day of school in Barcelona. Before that move, I hadn’t even imagined you could change cities or houses. The furniture still hadn’t arrived and my sister and I were spending our nights in sleeping bags. The walls and ceiling of my room looked like the canvas of a camping tent; there was the same fear of the dark, there were the same wild sounds (boiler, freezer, cistern). At school I made friends with all the boys I met. My sister had a tougher time: whenever Mother dropped her off she started crying and embarrassed us. So many mothers, so many fathers, so many half-told stories that must be over by now. An entire generation at the nursing-home doors, and back then I peered at them through the fog of preadolescence, without any subtlety of feeling. Those boys (Jacobo, Eloy, Antolín) saved me from isolation, but they gradually broke away from me. By any adult yardstick, they couldn’t have been worth much as friends.

The street curved twice before descending toward the sea. Before I saw the brasserie’s sign I recognized Pedro-María’s lanky figure dragging a motorcycle, and back came his school nickname. We called him Serrucho, the Saw, because he was long and pliant and he walked as if his limbs were coming out of their joints: a kid who was easy to bend. He greeted me by waving his entire arm, then he took off his helmet, shook his head, and smoothed a great mop of graying hair. I wasn’t prepared for the hug he gave me, nor did I remember those blue eyes, misty and cold. He flattered me by saying I looked well.

“Wait till you see the view here.”

La Brasa was styled with vine-covered trellises, and its decor featured fake wine barrels. He had reserved a table with a garden view; the whole place smelled like ashes.

“You can eat like a fucking king here, Johan.”

I could imagine the food, but that “Johan” caught me off guard. Who would ever believe I was Saw’s best friend? Could I really make him the confidant of my second marriage? What was this really about — confessing our little secrets? I waited for help from the past, but no shimmering flashback came to save me, nor were we rescued by a fade to black. Since I didn’t dare to flee, we sat down together at the table instead.

Two beers and a plate of olives came to the rescue. We talked about the temperature, about whether I’d had trouble finding the place; it’s not so awkward to fall back on that kind of thing. Unless you’re some kind of professional friend, one of those who’s spent two decades meeting up with the same people to dissect the Barça game, slurp snails, or go on bike rides together, the years will probably put a distance between you and your old friends. Your day-to-day will bring all kinds of new people into your life: colleagues, additions to the family, neighbors who want to show off their apartment — there just aren’t enough hours for them all. You don’t lose sight of your old pals, echoes reach you from the distant zones they occupy — who they’re seen with, approximately what they do, and how much they spend — but you gradually replace them. I mean, they’re like an insurance policy, and you can rely on them when you need someone willing to grant you half an hour’s honest conversation (bodily failings, fevered corners of the heart), free of the misunderstandings, suspicions, and presumptions that surround new relationships. With these people there’s no need to hide the fact that in the relatively near future we’ll begin to disappoint each other, because with these guaranteed friends placed within our reach by search engines, nobody’s trying to take each other for a ride: we’ve botched things enough as it is.

Pedro-María ordered salad and two T-bone steaks. I didn’t make a peep — it was too sad a day to be vegetarian. I promised myself, though, that I wouldn’t touch the wine. I’d do what you used to when you didn’t feel like drinking: just wet my lips.

If we’d been introduced as adults it would have been hard for us to break the ice: ever since Barça stopped being also-rans I only watch football occasionally, the nicest thing I can say about politicians is that they’re a bunch of deadbeats, I don’t think Pedro-María would be that interested in my BBC science documentaries, and it was too soon to start talking about my new field of interest — the neurotic neurons of my successive female companions. Of course, it didn’t even take us five minutes to turn to our shared history. We’d spent only eight years together, but time had passed so slowly on the way to school, the hours of boredom in the classroom had been innumerable, it was like we’d been moving through a heavy liquid that embedded those few years into a layer of our souls as deep as it was accessible.

While I went bounding up the stairs two at a time to plead on behalf of the class that the teacher postpone the geography test…while I was lacing up my shoes on the basketball court as my teammates took up their positions…it made me sad to think that all those golden bodies brimming with youthful energy would head off to different universities, marry strange girls, buy distant apartments. All the boys in our class came into the world and consumed so much energy as our bones matured…I swear, when I was twenty you could never have convinced me how fast I would pass thirty, that all it took was one month running into the next. It seemed marvelous, being blessed with a pair of hands with which to act upon the world, but it was really just a trick, too common and widespread a phenomenon for any single manifestation to warrant much concern. They knotted a tie around Pedro-María’s neck for the graduation photo in 1979, and you could think of that photo as the critical mass from which we would all emerge, propelled every which way. Before long we would separate into the ugly ones, the idiots, the ladykillers, the beautiful souls, the health freaks, the caretakers, the dupes, the slackers, the men of mystery, the armchair generals, the worriers, the cowards, the ones who founder when they hit the first heavy weather, the tyrants, the wimps, the bosses, the humanitarians, the leaders of charmed lives, the prodigies and the late bloomers, the shrinking violets, the filthy pigs, the brawlers, the weaklings, the shut-ins, those who seemed destined never to grow but then started growing, or never to fall ill, never to die, now scattered among various clinics, savoring their various phases of resignation and united by the same muffled farewell song, bound together by the secret filaments of a shared sense of shame.

Our conversation turned to the lives of our old classmates. Pedro pronounced their names in a tone that implied he was personally offended by the years that separated him from them, and I silently filled in their nicknames: Tapia (the Jew), Maureso (Cheese Face), Aurelio (Minor), Jiménez (the Bean)…Pedro-María (the Saw) had entertained himself by finding these guys out there wherever life had dragged them unawares and dissolved their distinctive youthful traits into an indistinguishable smudge: they get married, have kids, name them; they get divorced, land jobs, lose them. A kind of predictable and pleasant existence if you’re starring in it, but you’d need a novelist’s imagination to find the excitement in those worn-out grooves.

Jacobo was the only one I was interested in; we’d been true friends, and then his father was ravaged by a fast kind of cancer. He had to give up his sleepaway camps and English lessons, and the fact that he stayed on the team and at that school was thanks to scholarships that all the other families subsidized, and which required him to get the best grades. To me it was normal for a housekeeper to heat up my milk at breakfast — I couldn’t imagine what it meant to grow up poor, trying hard to be grateful, with all the exhaustion that entails. Jacobo was a bit dense, but he made up for it with tenacity. He started passing everything, and in exercises that required only perseverance he was unbeatable. On the court we understood each other; he was short, wolfish, well developed for his age, and he ran around like a dervish. Every time I caught a rebound I knew he’d be there, hounding the rival defense. He was the kind misfortune can’t cut down, the kind who ends up bowed but tougher.

When I got home I looked up Jacobo on Facebook. I hadn’t found him before because he used his first initial and his father’s aristocratic last name. In his profile picture he was wearing a suit and showing off his watch. Three weeks later we ran into each other by chance. Jacobo was coming from his dentist; his face was so numb his voice sounded padded. He shook my hand warmly. He was still in good shape — short guys are really made for the gym. I guessed he made fourteen payments of about 4,500 euros, plus a company car and expenses: that’s the kind of security he exuded. Something masculine drove me to present myself on his level, and I told him about my cheese business. I got a little too into it, and then I had to listen to myself reciting selected fragments of the ruin of my most recent marriage. I remember it well, because I illustrated the tale with a passport-sized photo of you that I don’t think I’ve ever taken out of my wallet. I think I bored him. If it had been up to me we would have met up again. I suggested it but he didn’t show much interest.

Pedro-María also updated me on Veiga, on Lacayo and on Portusach…that nutter had looked up relationship and work information on every one of our classmates I could think of. I don’t remember what lie I made up when he asked me what I did for a living.

“You have no idea how happy I am to know that you’ve stayed true to our spirit.”

I took a deep, reckless gulp of wine. We’d been schoolmates, we’d ascended the podium together to have medals hung around our necks (though if you passed him the ball in the low post, he’d spin with the grace of a pro at the speed of a paralytic, then they’d take the ball from him and block him — he had a silken wrist he could barely shoot with). Together we learned about the rich array of sexual possibilities (he told me what condoms were all about, I explained to him why it was cool to smile when the teacher said “sixty-nine”), and we were still there, together, seated and tense, the first time we shared the classroom with girls: the soft features, the sweet perfume. We went to buy our first jackets together, felt the first sways of drunkenness, commented on the international news in the paper, simulating a virile interest in the world. What I mean is, he was no alien to me, we’d grown from the same vine, and not enough time had passed nor would life last long enough to exhaust that shared memory.

“I opened a Facebook account to find interesting people, Johan, and I can really talk to you.”

Saw just sat there looking at me with that cloying smile. I waited for one of those automatic replies that can save a situation, but I couldn’t string together a coherent phrase. I think that’s called blanking, and it’s an odd feeling.

How do people lose each other?

It’s not deliberate. You don’t know if you want to hear from them, you don’t know if they’ll want to hear from you.

You go traveling, you change neighborhoods, you have a girlfriend who doesn’t want to hear about your past, who brings you too much happiness, too many problems. Work swallows your free time, your parents get ill and gobble up any extra energy, you have children who grow into bottomless pits, you’re worried about the economy, you’re ashamed to have become one of those responsible citizens who brush their teeth three times a day, you’re annoyed by your background, frightened of it, you envy them — who knows what you’ll find, what they’ve turned into? It’s funny to think they might still be what they were, to speculate about what they’ve become.

You let the months slide by because you’re confident those people will still be there when you get in touch, and by the time you finally get around to it they’ve changed too much or are too unchanged, expecting old gestures that you’ve lost, recalling aspects of you that no longer match the person you’ve convinced yourself you are, a person they no longer recognize.

The time goes too fast or too slow and one day you find yourself with old photographs, unsent e-mails, unfulfilled plans, the whole affair becomes too dense to flow freely, you no longer know what to do with the distance, how to grasp it. Friendship is rooted in shared activity, it’s nourished by everyday challenges. Keeping up to date, notifying each other of changes, sharing projects that prevent the erosion of your shared substrate. But to remain close to the same people for so many years and not grow apart — it’s a bit repugnant. We’re charmed by the idea but we grow tired of the same faces.

What did I matter to Saw? What interest could he have in a childless, divorced, chronically ill man? Why would he care about the layers time had deposited on my body? The lesson I’d learned from the heart scare was that we will never be as young as we are right now, but Pedro-María wasn’t interested in having a forty-something guy remind him how precious his remaining healthy days were. He wanted me to help him immerse himself in the past, the time of promise: his memory of the past, and the past of his dreams.

Nothing good could come of this meeting. I had made a mistake; our roots had rotted from damp.

“I’m going to take a piss.”

It was good timing, but I wasn’t faking: one of the side effects of the pills I was taking to thin my blood was diuretic. The drug liquefied my fat and sent streams of toxins to my bladder. I’d lived for years without knowing that the walls of that gourd grew slack with use. No more pissing before going out at night and holding it till dawn. These days I need to go every half hour, and I never really feel empty. I’ve had to overcome my fears and make my way into the toilets of bars, restaurants, cinemas, and burger joints, where surprises left by other ghastly people, intentionally or not, await me. We old folks are truly adventurous.

The bathroom at La Brasa was clean, courtesy of a gallon of bleach dumped over the floor; my eyes watered. I turned on the tap, and I had gotten so used to the role of senescent that I was surprised to see in the mirror the skin of a still-taut face, healthy lips, my wavy golden hair. I scrubbed my hands with soap and water; men who only wash afterward don’t appreciate their most delicate part. I unzipped my fly and confirmed the mismatch between the urgency I felt and the paltry amount of urine. Going for a piss is hell: all that wasted time while you wait for it to finally dribble out.

I went back to the dining room and the view was still crummy, but the light slid honeyed and cold over the table, and my glass shone with greasy fingerprints. Pedro had knocked back what was left of the wine, and he looked at me with crystalline eyes: he didn’t wear contacts.

“Should we order another bottle?”

I missed my chance to tell him my body had forgotten how to process cholesterol, that the residues of that wine, the slab of red meat with its blackened edges, would build up like gravel and threaten to burst my heart, or blow a blood vessel in my brain and leave me a half-wit.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Then he told me about how tired he was of working for other people, how sick of trading his time for a subsistence wage. Also, he’d had enough of programming, designing websites for guys who were unable to learn the basics themselves. He told me he wanted time for himself, that when he headed out with his Nikon he felt he was better, healthier, a good person. He told me that ever since signing his first employment contract he’d been waiting for the ideal moment to dedicate himself entirely to photography: he had a real feel for light, he felt his talent deserved recognition. He’d tried to steal hours from work, but by the time he left the office he was too tired, he couldn’t find a second wind. He was swamped by the shopping and the washing and all the other tasks that pile up, oblivious to the artistic spark that burned within him.

“I’m not fooling myself anymore. The perfect time is never going to come. You have to force things along, you have to dare to jump from the train while it’s moving.”

He gave me his Instagram.

“That’s what I do. That’s my calling.”

He told me not to miss the comments, which would show me what his photographs evoked in other aficionados. Their words were injections of energy that kept him from giving in to the zombie life, the office life, the life all the rest of us lead.

“I’m tired of dreaming of a shadow life. I want to attack it head-on, get inside it, live at its center.”

He told me he planned to ask for fewer hours and less pay, or at least to be absolved of all the meetings: staff, department, sales, purchasing, empathy and synergy trainings. He told me that at big corporations they keep track of every minute you spend having breakfast, going upstairs to smoke a cigarette, or to the bathroom.

“It’s despicable.”

He told me that there is life throbbing within each of us, and we have the chance to feed it. He told me that our forties are a creative decade, that he felt he had the strength and imagination to reinvent himself, and he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way. He wasn’t about to stay stuck in the hole they’d dug for people like him: people who had gone to school, fulfilled their responsibilities, people who let themselves be hoodwinked. He told me it was a good moment for entrepreneurs, that the atmosphere was charged with energy and banks were giving credit away.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t waste any more time.”

He told me he was sick of being tested. They demanded an output he couldn’t keep up with, his nerves were as exposed as stripped wires (and he reached out his arm as he said it, as if I could see right through his skin). The envy he felt, which diminished him and left him dwelling on his own insignificance, wasn’t a sign of small-mindedness — it would disappear once he’d embraced a life equal to his ambitions. He was willing to live on as little as it took; he felt compensated because a good photograph brought beauty into the world. He was going back to basics: money in his pocket, straightforward adventure — that’s why he’d sought out old friends online who were single or divorced, undomesticated boys who weren’t going to surrender, who wouldn’t give up until the final whistle blew. And that’s why he didn’t ask anything about me: he had me all figured out.

“No one can understand me like you.”

Why would I understand him? Because we’d shared eight years of classes, a hundred training sessions, a thousand physical exertions? We’d had similar experiences, but they had gone through different heads that they’d imbued with different characters, before being integrated into constellations of events, fears, and expectations we could never share.

“Of course I understand you, Pedro, I understand you perfectly.”

He invited me to have another coffee, he invited me to take a shot, he invited me on a walk, he invited me to have a drink, he knew a stupendous gin bar at the foot of the mountain, he could take me on the back of the motorbike. If I’d proposed going to the dog track he would have accepted — any plan struck him as better than going home. Even though I thought Pedro was a cretin, a certain congeniality was starting to pervade our conversation, a dangerous camaraderie that smoothed over any friction. One more step and there’d be no turning away from that friendship. I was saved from dragging out the night any longer because I find it vaguely gay to ride on the back of a motorbike, and also because of the lingering fear left by my heart scare; I was going to behave. We said good-bye, exchanging assurances that we’d never let our friendship lapse again. Then I told him I’d lost my mobile, and I switched a digit in the address I gave him.

I watched as he got on the bike, looking for all the world like a string of sausages on a hook. I turned around and headed uphill to avoid his little wave. Once I was alone I walked — gastric fluids slogging away at the bolus in my stomach — through empty lots as spacious as hangars, down unexpected slopes, across bridges and down blind stairways, along streets so open and deserted it was like there’d been an outbreak of a deadly virus. The alcohol began to dissipate, leaving a naked remorse for having injected myself with that hunk of meaty blubber; the lipid polyps must be playing deadly Tetris in my veins. Joan-Marc and Pedro-María, Pedro-María and Joan-Marc: those compound names are hilarious. I wouldn’t be giving him a second chance — that farce ended right there. Friendship is overrated, it makes you overvalue the past, and nostalgia is a leech that sucks the blood from your brain. As soon as I’d gotten rid of the weight in my stomach, that very day, I’d get started on a girlfriend.

Once I’d reached my building on Rocafort and made it up the stairs, I could just picture my heart slumped exhausted in my chest, so I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, flipping through channels, all fifty-two, and back again to the beginning. I got sick of cooking shows, tennis matches, skinny teenagers shaking their asses, talk shows, movies that were half over, those dramas that always end with a cliff-hanger, and the news feed on repeat, programmed by the CIA. My neighbor had gone on vacation and this time he’d remembered to turn his router off, and I knew all my DVDs by heart. Nor could I sleep with the thunder of taxis and buses from the Gran Via, so I got up and poured myself a proxy: a tumbler full of cold water with lemon. I’ve read somewhere that taste is a mental construct, that those yogis who spend their lives upside down have such control over their enzymes and taste buds that they can call up at will the flavor of crunchy chicken wings, or a curry, or whatever they eat in Tibet. And I’m not saying that a good placebo can’t cure a cold, or appendicitis or AIDS — I won’t be the one to deny the power of positive thinking. I’m just saying that my own brain let me down when I asked it to imbue that tap water, between the insipid foretaste and the chlorine aftertaste, with just a hint of Tanqueray.

Thinking about Helen helped me get over my state of prostrate self-indulgence. Only a fool like her would ever decide to attempt a reconciliation in that storehouse for old fossils weighted down by arthritis, paresis, hearing aids, and the metal scars of pacemakers stuck into the flesh of their hearts. First wives are not the best topic of conjugal conversation, and you were a bit naive when I first met you, so we didn’t talk about Helen much. Though I must admit it was delightful to have my two ribs together in the same scene on the stage of my imagination — one of the tricks that makes having the thing worthwhile.

And at first glance, you wouldn’t have thought Helen held many secrets: a stupendous blonde, predictable as an innocent joke. You got more of a sense of her ambition with every breath she took…people are so blank at first, and they conform so well to our stereotypes…Of course, you can take even the dullest person around, stir her up with your words, and before long you’ll see rising to the surface all kinds of feelings and ideas that flow from her unique blend of interests, and you’d never have known they were there. There’s a private universe in every single vessel of flesh taking up its space on sidewalks, in chairs, on buses. Billions of brains pumping all kinds of mental matter. Nature overdid it with us — we’re a real waste of resources.

One of those brains was atop my shoulders twenty years ago as I went walking in Madrid. It was spring, and I went into a fruit shop with a craving to sink my teeth into the sweet pulp of a peach — and there you have the kind of boy I used to be. I’d received my master’s diploma in the mail, and I’d hung it beside my degree in management and business administration; I’d just bought myself a TAG Heuer with a round black face. Although I wasn’t the ambitious type, it wouldn’t be totally inaccurate to say I was in Madrid for work, only it wasn’t the kind of job that involves alarm clocks, metros, and salaries, or coming home at the end of the day with a brain turned to mush. I’d heard tales of that fantastic world, and my family had all concurred it wasn’t for me. My job involved meeting with Dad’s veteran clients: during lunches I wore a listening face, and if they asked me any questions, I replied that I’d rather understand the ins and outs of the business before making any decisions — they really liked that phrase. They introduced me to their kids and I met new people every night. We could spend two hundred euros on a single dinner — hell, on one bottle of wine. I let myself be carried along; I had no intention of letting Dad’s “business” embitter me; I was in Madrid at the end of May, my favorite city at the prettiest time of year.

They welcomed me into a circuit of house parties and we went out every night. I pretended to understand the in-jokes, the obscure allusions. In every little group we tossed around a set of names that it felt good to criticize, accuse, and belittle. People would collapse from boredom if we couldn’t bitch about those who aren’t here.

We’d stay seated until dessert, then drink coffee and digestifs standing up, in shirtsleeves, mingling freely in the space that yawned between the balcony and the terrace. The nights were starting to grow warm, and the parties were held with the windows open to the noise from the street: fragments of conversation, wafting laughter, improvised songs that filled the room with a sense of rushed delight. The little groups traded members, and it was always strange to see the moment when the various cliques melted together in a jolly wave that washed over the whole room before subsiding.

Vicente’s apartment wasn’t up to the standard of Rétiz’s or Álvarez del Valle’s, but since his father’s widow traveled all the time, we convinced ourselves that the relative restrictions on space forced us to be more selective. Plus, Vicente was the kind who would work for it; that evening he’d covered his floor with a felt cloth, and in every corner stood a candelabra giving off a spicy aroma — incense or sandalwood — that almost concealed the impregnated nicotine. I assumed it was another vintage party, which were all the rage then. We were like a generation gone astray, puzzled by our own era; unable to give it a recognizable iconography, we flirted instead with decades past. Still, I was thrown by the gigantic pillows and the little Buddha statues. Vicente cleared it up with one of his unctuous phrases:

“It’s an ethnic party.”

Every night, after the girls and the more sporadic guests went home to sleep, we’d have a coda to the party: we cleaned up plates and glasses, straightened the lamps, we conjured spells against hangovers with cold water and amphetamines that we ventured down to the street to buy. It was all very “hail fellow well met”; when you have a comfortable couch and the caress of well-tailored clothes, it’s hard to convince yourself of life’s seriousness. It was too distant, off in a place I never planned to go, one not made for Vicente or for me: after all, someone had to benefit from our fathers’ efforts.

In a way those were still university parties (Vicente hadn’t quite finished), and names of students figured on the lists of possible invitees. So I suppose I heard about Helen before I ever saw her — something about the way she shook her mass of blonde hair when she laughed, her peculiar pronunciation, and her scandalous way of looking a person up and down. Her gaze didn’t creep along over skin and cloth like the eyes of those little English spiders. No, Helen’s pupils slurped down the world in gulps. She’d come to Spain on an athletic scholarship — hurdles, long jump, something like that. Imagine the kind of details that get tacked on when you add alcohol to intoxication: you let rip, box people up in a comic, improvised profile; no one is so respectable you can’t cut them down with words.

So I guess we invited her because we liked her way of savoring Spanish words and the way her pallid freckles danced when her expression changed; because she had caught my friends’ attention and now they wanted to talk to her far from the cafeteria and classrooms, in a territory foreign to Helen and familiar to them. Thanks to an annoying back sprain I got as I was leaving a dull meeting with Passgard, I missed the first evening that Helen spent among us. Vicente had told me about how she’d been unable to respect people’s personal space, but no one prepared me for the uninhibited relationship she had with her prizewinning anatomy, an ease on display every time she went for a canapé or another glass. In a country full of boys and girls defined by habits of expressive restraint (we were eager to get naked but didn’t know where to start), Helen could only astonish us.

When I imagine those parties where the furniture fades into the background, I see myself standing among people whose names and features blur together. Entire hours have vanished, and what a bore it would be if we ever had to relive the past in real time. But Helen was sure she had seen me one night while I was holding court, seated like a Chinese emperor (an odd association) and attended by two beautiful girls (she herself was feeling ugly that day), sipping my gin haughtily, my sunglasses still on (it was cool then not to take them off inside). She didn’t even notice the ironed handkerchief I’d tucked into my breast pocket (in imitation of and homage to Dad), nor the toasty shade of my jacket, nor the waves drawn in the cloth of my white shirt with a very fine blue thread — sartorial details I’d calculated with the meticulousness of a nightingale choosing branches, leaves, and plants for its nest: mating rituals.

So I guess she was already thinking about me when she leaned against the upright piano as if it were the arm of a couch, and I guess her defiant smile was meant for me. I caught her turning her head several times — she seemed fascinated by her image in the mirror. She was having one of those evenings (later I learned to recognize them by the vibration of the air around her) when she felt comfortable in her skin, when the contours of her body coincided with her spirit’s intentions. She seemed to harbor a patient fury — a girl with a mind boiling furiously. If she looked so relaxed it was because she’d granted herself some time to calculate what her ambitions were worth, and where she should channel the energy she generated with those healthy young thighs. She was after someone who would help her propel her life forward, and judging from the way she looked at the light striking the folds of my jacket, she was reaching a conclusion. That’s why she exhaled the smoke so slowly (enough that she thought she did it slowly); that’s why those dark corpuscles in the blue of her irises were set in motion. It was something subtler and less intuitive than rating my attractiveness — she was trying to see herself through my body, catch a glimpse of what her future would be like if she were to mingle it with mine.

She emitted a sharper frequency than the other Madrid friends Vicente had invited. Together they composed a fuzzy and fanciful scene: figurines, fairies, and elves, ornamental effigies on a frame within which Helen swayed to the beat of the cloying music, full of that otherworldly American self-sufficiency. I can still see her moving among the minor players like a squirrel scampering among branches. I can see her now, holding her glass and wearing an aquamarine dress that was probably only green. I see her leaning with that torsion of the hips that is so her, as if propping her buttock atop her thigh….Now she’s wearing a dress the color of acorns, saffron, and beeswax. But no, I haven’t bought her that dress yet, we still haven’t even been introduced.

We had a conversation, but the sentences we used were important not for their semantic value but for the part they played in the attack strategy I’d established before ever opening my mouth: I wanted to leave with that girl. I went to look for her coat (an unbearable combination of stripes and plaid) and I said good-bye to Vicente, host and eternal geography student. He’d papered the living room wall with an enormous, detailed map of the mountains surrounding Madrid, the topography like isobars on weather charts. When I see Helen’s figure against that background, my imagination, falling victim to the euphoria and ambiguity of the picture, will always think of that modest map as a hyperrealist painting of brain circuits. Glass in hand, Helen looked like an idea formed by the nervous stimuli of those neurons. She looked taller than she was (that was the only day I ever saw her without having taken a tactile measure of her body), and so young she had only to reach out her arm to effortlessly touch the end of her adolescence. And why not admit it: standing there, holding both of our coats, I felt a fearful hand grip my throat. I was afraid I wouldn’t be alive enough for her.

I ruled out taking her to my apartment, so things went a step or two down toward more sordid settings. To make up for it I spared her public transportation, which was how she usually got around. We hailed a cab and headed off toward a house in Delicias where they rented rooms by the hour. It was two in the morning, and La Castellana was still humming. I remember how the car’s shocks were so worn out that the undercarriage scraped against the damp pavement, I remember all those fences Madrid has around gardens, houses, offices, banks — the vegetation of a secret city — and I remember I was ashamed to take her into a rathole where the same play had been performed by different actors over a good ten years. I diverted the taxi toward a decent hotel.

The same play! I had no idea back then about the diversity of sexual appetites, the violence and the good they can do you. I was only a child, and though I passed myself off as an expert I wasn’t at the level of my peers, who had scrawled their first lusty paragraphs on the blank pages of prostitutes’ bodies. I only had to imagine that mechanical touch, the professional who kept one eye on the clock and added up the bill, to know that brothels weren’t for me. My sexual history was dominated by mutual nervousness and occasional girlfriends. Now I was going to face my first American girl with only a few basic tricks (I knew about the sensitive zones of the neck, the ears; I wasn’t sure if that one girl’s armpits had just been a personal preference). It hadn’t been even three years since I’d discovered the benefits of caressing the inner thighs and the vulva, of summoning between her lips with my middle finger the dampness so crucial to coaxing out her retractive organ — my great ally in that labyrinth of folds. If Helen let me — her attitude wasn’t like other girls’, with whose modesty I had to negotiate every elastic band — I was pretty sure the trick would work. It was a physical reflex, like closing your eyes when someone threatens to throw something in your face. Though I must say, if I thought about it much, natural lubrication still provoked discomfort, admiration, and a bit of apprehension in me. When I opened the taxi door for Helen, she managed to step onto the curb wrapped in an aura of innocence, as if that night we’d do no more than embrace.

The moon looked like a newly crystallized liquid. Helen was lively from the wine and the dancing and the fresh air, and she didn’t stay still for a second while I was checking in. Under the elevator’s light I had the thought that the cross formed by her septum and cheekbones was the skeleton of an unformed soul. Within Helen flowed all sorts of contradictory, intense emotions. Her turbulence didn’t repel me in the least, I didn’t kid myself about that. From her very first kiss (avid, ferocious, American) I knew I preferred her to a fully formed woman with clear and fixed ideas. It’s good when you find a simpler person, one whose entire story you can contain in a telling, and experience, for once, the power of the storyteller.

Helen didn’t complain about the dim bathroom or the paint peeling from the ceiling. If the smell of disinfectant bothered her, she kept it to herself. Like those little animals that focus the spotlight of their vision on a shiny object, she was fascinated by the rectangular shape of the bed, as if the sheets were emanating an inviting air. But she was so confident inside that body straining against the fabric of her jeans (who knows where that dress went?), there was really no confusing her with some little wallaby or wildcat — she was no shy creature.

She dropped backward onto the mattress, and the creak of the springs made the muscles in my back tense up. She laughed, she was laughing and her marvelous laughter filled that hovel to the brim, and she let me undress her and we fell upon each other, fascinated by the provocative design of our flesh, the indentations so wisely placed, the warm openings. It was like spreading out enormous wings that swept away the habits of everyday thought, all the coldness and distrust. I don’t remember the sequence of events or any details, but I know that at some point I summoned up my courage and it was as if my glans were searching for something in Helen’s mouth; she pushed me away with open palms and we fell laughing onto the sheets. The pupils of the girl who would be my first wife were moving under a watery film. I embraced her, trembling at the intuition that we were on the brink of something, only we didn’t know what. The path lay hidden by a whimsical orography, and we laughed because we felt complicit enough to travel it together.

I must have done something right for Helen to start building her new life project around our satisfied bodies. She never objected when I wanted to see her, sometimes with less than an hour’s notice and on the other side of Madrid. My business was getting going, meetings were multiplying, but Helen would take the metro, buses, or taxis (that I would pay for) and she’d wait for me with a patent-leather handbag and her arms pressed close to her sides. I allowed myself the pleasure of letting her enter the rooms before me, of watching the surprise on her face as she calculated the square footage while she undid the swan of folded towels. She loved the lace curtains and bathtubs, the TVs and remote controls that she always grabbed first. One of the good things about that period was that I still hadn’t learned the vast set of expressions Helen’s features could make. It was exciting not to know what face awaited me at the end of a kiss, or after she turned over, half asleep, or when, with one move in that game of bodies that settled us as a couple, her nose would come to rest a few centimeters from my eyes. She liked to order more food and drink than we could consume, and if I had to rush off, I’d let her stay draped over the unbound swan-skins, surrounded by the scent of bodies and the steam from the shower, dunking the succulent thighs of something like chicken into chemical sauces. We went back to the hotel from our first night, and we even visited the place that charged by the hour, though I regretted bringing her there. She was so lovely in the white shirt we’d bought at the market, the stockings with claret-colored thread that she wore to add a risqué touch. Girls in love can also be blank pages to paint upon.

It’s hard for me to visualize Helen without adding filters that belong to the future of that couple who used to seek each other out under the welcoming Madrid skies. I’m learning to adjust the viewfinder so it only lets in enough light to show the Helen that fits this part of the story. And so I discover again, among clumps of insignificant phrases and lovebird idiocies, that she was living in a poorly ventilated dump with three other students (Peter, Mark, and the amazing Ali), that they had revoked her scholarship, that she was supposed to go back to Montana in one month but she didn’t have the strength to write to her parents and tell them, or to buy a ticket (and I never did figure out how she managed to stay afloat in Madrid without any money). Ultimately, if for a few weeks she’d nursed the dream of a reckless life in a Spanish paradise of tapas and bullfights, it was time to start bidding it farewell. So for her, our first night must have been like the lucid hangover of her dream state: here was a guy to sink her teeth into, a southern specimen, not too dark-skinned, who appreciated the touch of her splendid body, which was the only thing Helen had to offer. We were two naked and confused kids (because things weren’t actually going so swimmingly for me, either: bonds, shares, letters of credit, benefits, preferred stocks, property, contracts, and loans…all orbiting the flame that was gradually cooking my family) who found themselves at the end of their teenage boredom marked by plans gone awry, discovering that the greed they have for each other can occupy their minds for hours on end. That together, they can compress their worries into something that fits inside a fist.

So when Helen showed up at my apartment in a green wool dress, wearing rain boots and dragging a suitcase with tags from suspicious airports, I thought about throwing her out — enough was enough. The impulse flashed into my mind the same way you realize you’ve cut your fingertip with a knife before you even see the wound or the blood. Helen stood stock-still with her feet together and her stomach sucked in, wheedling, with that lower lip of hers too thick to be taken for a sign of intelligence. She was quiet, she swallowed, she was solicitous. She told me that something beautiful depended on me, and I discovered I would have been a magnanimous god: I sent her out for bread and ham and half a liter of wine. I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I understood fully, I knew perfectly well what that “you can stay here” really meant, but when I tried to make out the implications for my future, my sight grew dim. My gray matter has never been good at calculating the medium term, and for me the word “future” meant next Wednesday.

It wasn’t hard to force the little lock and open her suitcase, though it was slightly harder to convince her it had already been broken. In one week I’d seen three-quarters of her wardrobe: there was the suit skirt, the striped T-shirts, the jacket that was too big for her, the red blouse with shoulder pads, the tube miniskirt, the patent-leather mini, and some kind of polka-dotted garment. The panties and stockings and bras (which we’ll get to later) that she’d packed were proof she had no intention of leaving. My father had informed me of that female peculiarity while smoking a rancid cigar on the sofa, so it must have been a Sunday and I must have been anxious to escape. It was the kind of transfer of manly information that leaves both parties fairly disconcerted — it was hardly his intellectual legacy. It’s ridiculous how those half-heard ideas end up permeating our beings. But it was a good piece of advice: after I found your cruel note, the thing that convinced me you were serious this time was the fact that you’d taken the portion of the underwear that you wore. You only left behind a single green stocking, balled up where I found it later, at the back of the drawer where you couldn’t reach.

Helen came into my Salamanca bachelor pad with the intention of staying (I almost said “staying under my wing”). And not only did I open my home to her, I did something even more insane, just because it seemed the natural thing to do. I asked her to marry me in a civil ceremony. Her parents could meet mine later (neither of us noticed the other’s shudder of horror), and we would formalize our union on a grander scale, as only priests can do.

Granted, in one sense we’d only been fucking. Sure, our sexual fervor had formed canals that irrigated all our worldly activities: I’d be at the cinema or getting dinner, leaving a meeting, taking a short walk to a taxi stand, and my nerves would remind me of the singular pleasure of squeezing her breast, of removing her swimsuit, of kissing the lips of her cunt. It was the kind of relationship where what you want is not a safe distance from which to evaluate your partner with equanimity, but rather to get her into a house with you ASAP where she’s always in reach of your appetite. The kind of relationship that demands you live together or let the lust devour your thoughts down to the root of your brain; think of it like the fire of a biblical marriage — an unstoppable love.

A civil union was as sad back then as it is now, but the event was eroticized by its furtive unexpectedness. I showed up in morning dress, wearing a black tie that, since I’d arrived in Madrid, had led a sorry itinerant life through the offices of accountants, bureaucrats, and lawyers specializing in financial rescue. Though we’d promised to leave our families out of it, I couldn’t resist sporting Dad’s cuff links. Vicente, whose name Helen took pains to pronounce as if it were spelled “Bicente,” came as our witness. We paired him with a chubby Italian woman whom my fiancée presented as her “dearest friend” and whom my wife didn’t take half a morning to condemn to the abyss of traitors (and now that I think about it, I never found out why). The sky was lofty, blue, smooth, promising. The extremities on my left side trembled as Bicente and the other fifteen people we invited to round out the party threw rice at us. Someone blew a horn of German origin that for years afterward I thought was a tradition from Helen’s homeland (the Thrushes had migrated from the Neckar valley to the shuddering depths of America). For the first time ever, we kissed with our tongues tucked under the domes of our palates, and when the cold putty of her lips touched mine, I felt my nerves prickle lasciviously. Suddenly it didn’t seem a bad idea for Catholics to impose premarital chastity. With his eyes closed, the groom could follow his blood from heart to peripheral organs, letting it lick the walls of his veins as he anticipated the nakedness that, once uncovered in dread and excitation, he could savor all night long under the light of a honey-soaked moon.

We ate dinner in a restaurant with tables set out under the shade of two oak trees. We treated ourselves to a banquet of salads and tempting fish with shiny scales, and however I try to recall that scene, I always come back to the same little branch of scorched thyme standing out against the white of the plate. Not as white, though, as the “surprise” cake Bicente had ordered, which was precisely what you’d expect from a mind as simple and optimistic and content and good as that of my dear friend from Madrid: icing, our names, the outline of a heart. In the elevator going upstairs we barely looked at each other, victims of a sudden modesty, and Helen noticed me twirling my wedding ring as if it were too tight. I couldn’t even muster an erection when her stockings came off. The night was so rehearsed it was as if I could hear the audience breathing, and I felt the expectations of the entire species weighing on the back of my neck. As you know, if I ever attract the attention of passers-by it’s only because they’ve caught me in a spontaneous outburst of histronics. I’ve never sought out the spotlight.

“Let’s just keep the party going.”

And so, rather than nursing my wounded masculinity or relieving my troubles by banging my head against the wardrobe mirror, we caught a taxi to Chueca and hopped from bar to bar drinking gin and tonics, enchanted with our existence. The fabulous couple, the most sociable newlyweds the city had ever seen, rejecting propositions from men, from women, married couples, you name it — even urban centaurs: females from the waist up, males between their legs. And we went back to the bed in that apartment that didn’t feel like ours, but to which we had the key, no small thing. And, half undressed, my ring rolling off into the corner where it took us five days to find it, we undertook the first married variation of the exhilarating, vigorous yoking of love. I won’t go into detail, but I felt pretty good about having married a woman who expressed herself freely, who faced problems head-on without complicated grievances. A woman you could surprise with an embrace from behind and she wouldn’t make you feel like a savage. A woman with whom I didn’t have to temper my occasional fits with doses of timidity just to acclimate to the social temperature in the room. Here was a woman who knew how to laugh out loud, who knew how to shout, a woman who wouldn’t give in, who knew how to fight so we’d be purified inside: she was an innocent beast.

I was supposed to return the keys to the apartment a week later, but I’d decided to arrange things so we could stay in Madrid. Bicente would help, and so would all those friendly citizens who snack in the streets and always invite you to join them. I knew only too well what awaited me in Barcelona, and I’d gotten married before I could even tell Helen, much less figure out how to handle it. Plus, Helen was no good for Barcelona. She wasn’t like you or the rest of those Eixample show ponies — with your insipid air of contrition and tight buttocks, all of you convinced you’re standing at the top of the podium, from where you can turn in disdain to survey the rest of the world in all its backwardness (oh, that expanse of provincial villages). That night I dozed off convinced that Helen would bow to my superior wisdom, content to let herself be dragged through the steps of a manly dance. I fell asleep satisfied, a man ready to enjoy a marriage underpinned by reason.

But she was against it. She told me she couldn’t stand the smell of garlic in Madrid, the stench of fried food, all the short, squat guys with their African looks, the hours of raw sun without shade that burned the streets and the buildings: a string of words smeared with American bullshit. Helen had been in Madrid two or three months (I didn’t pay attention to the tally) and she still saw us through a lens of WASPy contempt (though I’d love to hear what a real WASP would have to say about her hips or that Teutonic jaw of hers). No matter where she was in the city she could hear a bull in agony, its saw-like shriek; she saw blood dripping down the walls (that was a good one), she couldn’t stand the women’s saggy backsides, the shadow of hair on their arms, the thunderous streets, the pink ties, the unpunctuality, so much vulgarity, the toothpicks. The toothpicks!

“I want to live in Barcelona.”

As if we were still on rational ground, I wondered what she thought she’d find in Barcelona: the same smells, similar light, craftier people, posers, exclusive circuits and cliques, spoiled fake blondes, suburban tracksuits, bumpkins from Alicante wearing thick-rimmed glasses, gossip, people who get choked up at the sight of grown adults holding hands and dancing in a circle; two flags, two languages, laughable politics, plastic bars, and that nightlife like a filthy, evil vacuum cleaner that sucks a guy in and teaches him to be his very worst.

“I can’t live so far from the ocean.”

I would have taken it better if she’d invoked Montjuïc, if she’d talked to me about Gaudí, about the Olympic Games, or Mariscal’s zoo full of moronic animals. But she disarmed me, that sea dog from Montana — a region celebrated for its open seas and marine vistas. There’s something so alluring in the most irreducible parts of other people’s absurdity; I’m left paralyzed and trembling in fascination. And what ocean was she planning to enjoy in Barcelona? That stretch of watered-down oil lapping at a shore of make-believe sand? I didn’t say anything, but I was on to her. Most people who long to live by the sea really just want to move to a city with a port, and there you have a good explanation. Helen wanted to spend her afternoons at customs, captivated by the heavy coming and going of ships, entertaining ideas of departure: a whole world before her, at whose center she imagined herself happy (that word).

As I lustily stirred the tomato sauce to keep it from sticking to the only crappy pot I had, I decided that if there was one place we were not going to live, it was Barcelona. I would have rather set up shop in Bilbao, or in a Sevilla boardinghouse, or in some tiny village that Helen would find “cute.” If she wanted to see the breakwaters and the grime in Barcelona, we could always visit. Of course, it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to have my arm twisted. I had half a dozen airtight reasons, and as soon as Helen stopped screeching and throwing clothes in suitcases, I would impose them on her until she was subdued by common sense.

But when I tried to reason with her, Helen went off to hide in a corner. My arguments drove her away as if I’d thrown a bucket of boiling water over her. I thought she would come around, you see, but she didn’t. The invisible molecules of machismo in the air I breathed had me convinced that three out of every four girls (give or take) moved through the world like fog, dampening things but never touching them, never taking charge. I was convinced they didn’t have words that stemmed from solid beliefs, and that they simply went along with the shifting moods of the moment. I wasn’t prepared for the woman I was living with to refuse to comply when it came to important decisions. This wasn’t about what color we were going to paint the walls or whether we should assemble the bed in this room or in the goddamn hallway. This was about where we were going to settle down, in which streets: whether we would stay in Madrid where I could call in favors and stall until my prospects improved, or whether we would move to a city where the word “problems” would swell up and fill my mouth again with its vile taste. I had little experience with people who really mattered to me, people who, for the sake of economy — or hygiene! — or just to keep from jumping out the window, we find ourselves obliged to presume are sane. What I mean is that this was crucial, and even though Helen didn’t know what she was talking about, I threw in the towel, I gave in, I bent right over. And worst of all is that I didn’t even kid myself, I knew no good would come of it, I had to put my foot down and I didn’t, that’s all there is to it. That neck I could have wrung with my bare hands was propping up a head full of crazy ideas about Europe, but we were going to live according to its rules. Now that was cause for alarm.

We boarded the plane, and my worries were swept away by that cloud-soaked sky. I’ve never been afraid of heights; I love to look out the window and see roads crossing the land while the distance rearranges the far-off horizon. I well knew the terrain beneath us on that journey: the grass-covered stands of an open-air basketball court, the slopes of rosy mud, and the forest of oaks with their treetops full of birds that took flight, frightened by the plane’s sound. That trip I noticed the concrete ovens of a power station, and a dry area where bulldozers’ teeth had broken the earth into clumps. Helen hung from my arm, and I smelled the minty scent of the candy she was sucking on, soaked in sweet saliva. The same saliva that, when she kissed me, so intoxicated me I thought I could see the ants moving in the open furrows of the ground below. Then we flew over a swampy river formed by several streams converging, and it was exciting to watch as the channel swelled and invaded the green expanse of the plain, dotted with yellow, blue, and ochre flowers.

The afternoon sun was starting to wane by the time we reached the ocean. Helen’s elation was contagious. She pointed at the speedboats floating on the monotonous blue, and we flew over wild coves, far from any apartments, gray piers, or artificial beaches. The coast regained its old frontier power: the end of the road for men of dry land. Before discovering latitude, throughout all those numberless centuries, the ocean routes were invisible, unknowable. Who among our great-grandparents could ever have imagined we would make our way into the skies? I’m sorry that I’ll miss out on interstellar tourism. Just imagine having a drink while you watch the Earth shrink into a vivid blue ball suspended in profound blackness, all that life protected by a flimsy film of atmosphere.

Since it was a clear day, I could point out to Helen the bulge of the coastal mountains rising like a limestone dream. We left behind little villages ensconced in the foothills, broad industrial belts, desert polygons, suburbs that spread like gray stains, and by seven o’clock I was pointing out the Torre Mapfre skyscraper that shone as clean as porcelain above the beige expanse of sand. I explained the grid-like layout of the Eixample, its cubic blocks, I named the thick furrow where the traffic flowed so slowly that each car’s flash of sunlight was visible; it reminded Helen of a water snake’s scales. She had her face pressed so hard against the window it wouldn’t have surprised me if the glass melded to her shape: her skin was hot, her lips damp, the love we gave off bathed the city in a welcoming light. Some days earlier, I’d been reading about the labyrinth of sewers and water lines that extended beneath the pavement and the pedestrians’ footsteps, like an inverse city designed for rats. Of course, I didn’t mention all that to Helen; after all, we’d be living aboveground.

We were going to settle in Muntaner, between Via Augusta and Mitre, the area newcomers considered to be the rich neighborhood — a place that always smells like flowers, something like that. We were living up a hill on a street with four dirty lanes, like a filthy highway. It wasn’t even an apartment, although it had its charm. It was a kind of guard tower, seventy square meters, which the developer had built on the roof to live in while he completed the facade and applied the finishing touches, and they’d forgotten to tear it down when they were done. Two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a door that didn’t close properly. Parquet floors, low ceilings, and a half-finished round plaster molding adorning the center of the bedroom ceiling like a coin corroded by acid. My father had ended up with the place in some business deal, and he’d arranged to keep the other neighbors from using their keys to the roof, in the middle of which the Turret reared up. Helen and I came to consider it our most prized possession.

The Turret enchanted Helen. She spent the first week scrubbing the roof tiles, using putty to fill in the baseboard that had come away from the wall in the humidity, scrubbing the hard-to-reach places with a wet toothbrush and scraping off the dirty paint, all while wearing white sweatpants and a handkerchief on her head. Ten years later, you told me that was called a bandanna.

Our electricity went off all the time, and we had fun lighting matches that left behind the smell of wood and traces of herbs that we couldn’t name in the other’s language: I knew a good amount of hers, and she knew some Spanish words that she placed haphazardly within a sketchy syntax. In between yawned a dark mass of objects not blessed with a name we both knew. Every night we emptied one or two bottles of white wine, sitting barefoot on the floor. She brought home chocolates, cheese, dried fruits, and nuts, and we’d put on soft music: compilations of romantic songs, the Italian singers in style then, I don’t remember their names. We let the conversation meander, we didn’t care where. She asked me about the humidity, whether it would really be cold in February, about the sights I would take her to see. She told me about the enchanting solitude of the long-jump pit, when the natural light drained away and she was focused only on the battle between her lower body and the sand, between the jump and the air. When the conversation grew sluggish, instead of listening to her, I would look at the dimples in her thighs, the awkward movements of her hands, her left earlobe that was a bit stubbier than the other: minute bodily flaws. My eyes would flit to them and I’d feel a shiver of tenderness. Gusts of salty air reached us through the windows; the sterile smells of a stuffy house and drying paint had been overcome by the scent of our clothes, the leather of our shoes, and the quince that I cut in half and left to ripen in the wardrobe. If she was wearing the green dress, her beautiful sweat drew dark circles under her armpits and at her inner thighs, looking like signs pointing to my destination. When it was too hot we went out to the terrace. We enjoyed watching the buses maneuver as they turned into a shadowy alley, narrow like a blind canal. Helen would bite her lip, and her skin shone under the industrial lamp that my father or the builder had tied to a post. I walked around in shirtsleeves — one of those exquisitely tailored shirts that didn’t survive our last move. It caressed the skin of my arms, the silky down I had back then. I could find no fault with my body, and I was more than satisfied with Helen’s.

From our perch, the city spilled out in all directions. She conceded it didn’t have the majestic charm of Paris (a city she’d never set foot in), but every night she enthused about a different mysterious corner: old reservoirs, packs of cats, improvised parties, and the hotel pools that at that hour look like unfurled sheets of blue light. I left her humming along with the notes coming from the stereo and went inside to top up our drinks. From that height, the great avenue of Diagonal stretched out like an unreal asphalt river. The night air, the sappy music, the glinting ice and the sweet effects of alcohol melted into a feeling of near-complete well-being. The windows of the buildings around us showed slices of intimate lives: living rooms, dining rooms, libraries, bedrooms, and other less straightforward backdrops. It was beautiful to watch them light up and go black as if obeying some secret pattern, an art exhibition where the paintings floated in the liquid dark of the air. It was exciting just to exist there among all those living beings, to think that we were made to take each other by the hand, to fantasize about flying off over the rooftops.

And when we went into the Turret and closed the door, I fucked Helen’s tipsy body with the combination of aggression, tenderness, and resolve of our first months together; and she would challenge me with her eyes, with unexpected positions, with whatever demands occurred to her, articulated in an improvised mix of Spanish and English. When we had to stop because we were laughing so hard, when I felt my dick engorged in her hand, I understood how wonderful it is to have someone to play with, to listen to, with whom you share an intimate space where you can talk without fear or hurry, until your characters reveal themselves completely. It wasn’t just her lack of inhibition as she displayed lips of pomegranate skin turned inside out, or how much she enjoyed having a young cunt with all of life ahead of it. It was also the way she maneuvered in the kitchen and the dining room, the pleasure with which she set her stubby little fingers to fixing domestic imperfections. My senses told me — and I believed them — that I had something to offer her in exchange for all that stimulation I slurped down greedily, feeding my confidence in my own social potential: I thought I could offer her a world to embrace.

“I want to see everything, take me to see it all.”

I took her for walks down the Rambla Catalunya, I took her to see the city from the top of Tibidabo, we strolled along the lookouts of Vallvidrera, we chased each other in the Parc del Laberint, and I led her into the damp Barrio Gòtic. If I resisted the Golondrinas boat rides, I more than made up for it with a guided tour of the modernist buildings of the Eixample, snapping photos of her in front of the Greek revivalist temple on Bailén. The factory chimneys surrounded by quaint plazas made her burst out laughing. Europe! So cozy and elegant, so many spaces planned down to the last detail, thought out over centuries. Twenty, at least.

“Take me to see all the important stuff, John. I studied art for a whole semester in college. I only missed class to go to track practice.”

She lingered in front of the worst paintings, commenting loudly (what a hard time Dad would have had getting used to a daughter-in-law who bellowed like that). She felt sorry for Nonell’s gypsies, and of the whole Fundació Miró the only thing that interested her was the sculpture garden; we spent a lovely afternoon there while she sipped from a can of Pepsi, bathed in a sensuous, impressionistic light. She told me that, as a little girl, she used to play at imagining how her boyfriends — she knew she wanted more than one — would smell, and that she’d never dreamed of a scent as delicate as mine. She also told me that she used to get down on her knees to pray every night to be spared the curse of a flat chest. Helen was wearing a white skirt that day, and I heard in her words the melody of the life left behind when you’re uprooted and moved to a new climate — she was a flower bed it was my responsibility to tend. We left the garden and went down a wide flight of stairs surrounded by dense red flowers that recalled a Mozarabic fantasy. Helen went ahead to stand in front of a Diana made of dirty stone, carved gracelessly; she started to scrutinize it as if she’d discovered a jewel that had been lost for centuries. The port air’s polluted damp had curled the ends of her hair. She wasn’t going to gain anything of aesthetic value from her contemplation, but her gracefulness when she concentrated fully on something was so delightful I didn’t hurry us on.

We had fights, I won’t deny it. We had our problems, but show me any young couple that doesn’t go through rough patches. When I got together with you I was already an old warhorse (innocence is gone so soon), but the boy who went to live with Helen was a mere pony, and fighting was a healthy and cheap way to get rid of our excess energy. We often clashed over condoms, and for some weeks she was even in favor of birth control pills, as if she wanted to try her luck smearing her insides with my sperm. Then she read in some women’s magazine about how my behavior was that of a selfish macho incapable of planning our sex life, unable to control myself every time the blood rushed to my balls. Of course I couldn’t contain myself! Of course I devoured her every time my appetite overflowed! That was what Helen expected, that’s why she had tied herself to me, and woe betide us if I ever stopped. The thing with condoms wasn’t just stubbornness, and it’s not just about the sensation, or the shape or even the smell of that repulsive latex. After decades of training as an adult copulator, I can definitively state that the technique of putting them on is beyond me. It’s for another branch of mankind to figure out. I’m convinced that men who can do it have, I don’t know, a retractable sixth finger, or the evolved dexterity of a second thumb. I had no intention of cultivating that skill: I was comfortable in my evolutionary niche.

Now I see clearly that I should have been more understanding. Helen was afraid that the pills would age her, that they would ruin her skin; she was afraid she would develop bags under her eyes and rolls around her stomach. She was extremely sensitive to aging — one gray hair could spoil her entire day. Watching her on her birthday was quite something: She’d skulk around the cake as if it were topped with an obscenity, a personal insult, rather than inoffensive candles dripping wax over scorched icing. She’d asphyxiate the candles in one breath and then leave; I’d have to cajole her, pry her from her bed with encouragement and a firm hand, just to get her back to the party. It was useless to tell her that I’d still find her attractive when all her hair was gray, her face wizened, her fingernails gnarled; her love of youth was stronger than her love for me. Or maybe she was resolved not to believe a word I said as long as I was in thrall to a youthful, fresh body. I’d often find her scrutinizing her legs in search of dead skin or a broken blood vessel, hunting for the floss of a white hair, or testing the firmness of her breasts (whose inevitable fall from splendor was going to be a sight only an idiot would miss out on). And if she caught me watching her out of the corner of my eye, she would rain insults upon me, as if I hadn’t seen her much more naked and in more compromisingly acrobatic positions, or as if those grooming sessions were so private they resurrected the barrier of modesty between us that had crumbled months before. The girl was very touchy about her looks; she was beset by ghosts from the future come to warn her about her decline. And now that worse paranoias have started to nest in my mind at the same rate as the plaque blocking up my arteries, I can sympathize with her: she’d been good; getting old (getting old!) was something that happened to other people, people who had done something to deserve that state. It never even crossed her mind that we might celebrate her youth while it was alive.

You have to understand: we were good together. We weren’t even a couple with problems — our days were full of happy hours. I’d accepted a job while we sorted out the mess of my inheritance, and the people there treated me like an emergency fund. They thought that if we found ourselves in trouble, I could inject enough healthy capital to get through four or five bumpy months. I never set foot in the office before eleven. Helen and I went out almost every night to try exotic gins, trailing a boozy wake behind us; for three months Barcelona conspired to show us exactly what it could do for a pair of newlyweds disposed to act like nocturnal animals. I suppose I already sensed that Helen should find herself a job sooner rather than later, that an active and healthy woman should spend her days doing something more fulfilling than shaking off a hangover. I started to look more kindly on the prospect of reining ourselves in: we’d be like those spermatophytes that wait for night to fall and then spread open stupendous, fleshy petals, as big as ships, and we’d pollinate the most trivial of tasks with gentle excitement. But I was in no hurry.

“I want to meet people. Everyone you can introduce me to.”

While I was enjoying life as a newlywed, Helen had been busy cooking up fresh ambitions. She’d convinced herself there were select circles of artists, wealthy, interesting, and glamorous people, or some such nonsense. She had only to learn to wield me like a key and she’d be able to access those secret spaces, and fulfill the fantasy that she’d been put on this earth to enchant the eyes and ears of the most refined society — whose specifics she’d never paused to consider. She nagged me stubbornly, with the sulky face I’d already learned to recognize as the sign she wasn’t going to let it go. We had so much without leaving the circle of our marriage — why kill ourselves to leave the house? Why, when we would only be exposing all the precious things that germinate in intimacy to the corrosive atmosphere of gossip? It’s one of the blind spots you two share, both the women I’ve loved. After all, didn’t you take home the best guy at the party? Didn’t we have fun together? Didn’t your orgasms come without complications beyond the ones we imposed by ludic agreement? Wasn’t the apartment you decorated comfortable? Didn’t we live in the city of your choice?

And so we began to visit places whose names are pronounced with an eye roll. In Barcelona they weren’t as into time travel as in Madrid. Here, the draw was the exoticism of the place itself: hotel terraces, ships, museums that opened their doors at night, towers, greenhouses. I had to get back in touch with people I’d cut off four years before because of the slime that oozed from them: phony cousins, Dad’s business colleagues, classmates from ESADE, occasional hook-ups, confidants…They didn’t receive me coldly — no sooner did we show our faces than a curtain of congratulations came down between us and them. I was the guy who’d been left out of the good life: some said because of misguided ambition, while others mentioned one hell of a family mess. Now that I was returning on the arm of an American stunner, why would they close their doors on me? They had no qualms — the eroticism of return and the anguish of the first-born’s departure were fodder for mass-market dramas, and we fancied ourselves sophisticates, we flattered ourselves that our minds were open and cosmopolitan, that we weren’t really Spanish. Plus, they thought Helen was funny.

Helen went mad with excitement. She compared my friends favorably to the rich people she saw on TV in the United States, whose weddings and divorces and parties and jewels she followed in magazines. She knew the details of every liaison conducted by people whose only purpose in life was consuming (you couldn’t call what they did “drinking”) cold martinis on boats. She knew who slept with whom, who sat beside whom at every dinner and at every race, who slipped from the spotlight, who fell into disgrace. If she hadn’t spent so much time too drunk to hold a pen, she could have written a gossip column.

At home, while she tried to stuff herself into stockings that would have been tight on a little girl, or in the taxi, where she would keep smoothing her hair, I tried to fill her in on backstories. I tried to prepare her, but she was too excited to absorb the raw truth of what I had to tell her, and I’ve never had the patience to make news digestible: this was no longer my scene, we were out of place, they would never accept someone like her. So I chose to arrive late, once the conversations were under way, and cross the room avoiding the bored looks from other guests. It was better than arriving at the beginning, when the groups were still unformed and hanging in the air like interstellar gas.

Helen walked into those living rooms, strolled among the tables, exchanged glances with people, and chewed on slices of ham, all the while convinced that something golden was stirring within her, a motor of human allure. She sashayed around with her chin held high as if she were a sliver of America itself, or a shard of meteorite just landed from outer space so we could admire its shine. She was desperate to reveal her hidden social talent to the world, though what that talent consisted of neither of us knew.

When Helen embraced me and told me she loved me, I merely smiled. While she headed off to join the cliques, I avoided conversation, retreating to a corner to observe the swagger of that body into which she was emptying the second, the third, the fifth gin and tonic. From that distance, I could ignore the emotions that flowed from our shared life, and instead tune in to the wavelength of the men around us who shared my cultural makeup. Without the filter of my love, they would see this: long blonde hair; a wide-eyed innocent from Montana with a sinuous body, grown amid the heaps of dimwits that spring up every year in the Midwest (Montana was somewhere around there); a rube with a typing certificate, plus half a bachelor’s degree in Romance Languages that hadn’t even given her a sense of tact when it came to hammering out French phrases — she always sounded as if she was chewing gum (she thought it was a Parisian accent). They’d see a girl who was expert in mixing drinks with soda and who’d sprouted a pair of tits you couldn’t ignore — living proof that the only democratic force on this earth is the one that distributes sex appeal. Of course, Helen’s wasn’t going to help her at all as long as she denied them the festival of fluids she reserved for me alone.

As for the women — well, I didn’t kid myself. I knew from the get-go they would be much worse. All those girls who knew how best to arrange their curves under well-tailored clothes, whose skill with color did an excellent job softening the heavy jaws they’d received as the twisted legacy of inbred generations. They were rivals to be reckoned with. Their parents’ money had kept them a long way from the real action, but they had a magnificent collective experience in getting what was “theirs.” They had no problem encircling Helen with an air of familiarity, but they didn’t let her into the murmur of their important, whispered conversations. They refused to make room for her. If they were debating some delicate point that could have created some complicity, they always lowered their voices. It was sad to watch her in those spacious rooms, flitting from one little group to the next, being tossed a handful of phrases like birdseed. A couple of times, I caught whichever girl Helen had chosen as a trial “best friend” fleeing to a remote corner to avoid her.

Sometimes we stayed until the end, when the group was wrecked, disheveled, blundering through the cigarette butts of repetitive conversations, glasses in hand while we composed precarious tableaux, sprawled over tables and chairs. If they opened the windows, a pleasant breeze would make the hairs on our arms stand up, and then we’d settle again into a friendly lassitude. It was lovely to seek out Helen then, to watch her smoking slowly in that almost empty space, effortlessly emitting the essential notes of feminine charm. When I let that calm state enfold me, the fibers of my eyes once again knitted into a lover’s gaze that saw clearly how Helen’s spirit was being chipped away. When we got back to the Turret, instead of putting on an album or a film and relaxing, she’d tell me she wanted to be alone. But she’d end up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, ruining my chances of watching TV. They showed good Westerns at that hour, heroes with morals and firm ideas about how to live them. Don’t you ever feel nostalgic for a simpler, unsullied world? With her jaw tensed that way, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Helen could spend the whole night awake, grinding the accumulated contempt between her molars until it turned to resentful dust.

“I don’t want to see them again, John. I don’t ever want to see those people again.”

If Helen’s ears had been open and her mind receptive, I would have told her the secret of polite society in Madrid and Barcelona, in Montana and among the Tuareg, who aren’t exactly known for their refinement: let the words slide right over you. Whatever they say, words are not knives, and they can wound you only if you go around with your chest bared, if you lower your guard, if you allow it. You have to disconnect, the way mushrooms spend their entire existence releasing spores, or sea horses devote their lives to swimming vertically. Get four people together in a house, at a restaurant, in a bar, and right away they’ll unleash their verbal poison. They don’t mean to hurt, they don’t even realize they’re doing it — they’re marking their territory, and they can’t help it. I’m sure you and your brother could recommend some author who’s written about this, but you’ll see it happening at any party, in every house, if you know how to look: people situate and redefine their insecurities in full view of everyone. You can’t hold it against them: once they stop measuring themselves against you and their position is clarified — once they confirm they’re sufficiently superior or inferior to you that they don’t have to compete — those same hateful people will do anything; you’ll find them jumping rope, yanking off their own ears, acting the fool to favor you and put themselves in a friendlier light.

Meanwhile, you’ll find dozens of volunteers willing to cut you down until you fit in a little box where they can mentally manipulate you, where your ambition, your initiative, your desires, your youth, the fire that drives you toward pleasure, her golden mane of glossy hair, her accent, her appetite to give her love to people who will let themselves be loved — where everything ends up dissolved in a neutral liquid. Just so they won’t be overshadowed, so they won’t be bothered, so they don’t have to explain (again!) what the hell they do with lives like theirs. They search for some ulterior motive for every glimmer of affection, they don’t rest until they find the immoral root of the most modest achievement; for once I barely even need to exaggerate. Simply, they were not going to tolerate some girl with wide hips (I tended to see them as powerful) who thought that life’s problems could be resolved by making her man happy baking cakes and then climbing into bed to combine naked skin with the tactile pleasures of satin. To them, tolerating that kind of racy innocence would be like letting a stranger spit thickly in their faces, and they weren’t going to let that happen. They did not let that happen.

But Helen didn’t want to listen or to learn. You’re too intelligent and refined to get involved in a social tug of war; you enjoy being mysterious, a fog of words. Helen was too direct and simple to stop them from dragging her through the mud, always with a smile on their lips — her performance didn’t allow for subtleties.

I gave her the short version:

“We’re too alive for them. They hold it against us.”

“And I want to meet your family. I’ve told you that. Les conocerés.”

That phrase (which she uttered parading around the Turret in some kind of poncho) isn’t a grammatical lapse, just what happens when I stop simultaneously translating the oddities of Helen’s Spanish into normal language.

My strategy consisted of letting days pass as if none of it had anything to do with me, like I was listening to rain fall. The contemplative life (which a philistine could confuse with indifference) had always been my fallback for facing difficulties. Why fight when I could just bore my adversary? Where you would have reacted with quiet withdrawal, Helen went for the usual routine: jealousy, shouting, fainting.

“How are we going to really love each other if you deprive me of family? You’re a bunch of missing pieces!”

It’s the story of my life: neither of you could recognize my obvious merits. She never appreciated that I didn’t keep up with saint’s days and birthdays, that I didn’t reserve Thursdays for exchanging marital advice with Dad, that I didn’t encourage her to keep my sister company on shoe-shopping trips to the Eixample. Do you think she ever thanked me for saving her from a clingy mother-in-law, a know-it-all brother-in-law, and a gaggle of cocksucking sisters? No she did not! She was even annoyed that I wasn’t more controlling of her — I didn’t ask her where she was going in those tight pants, I didn’t inspect the itemized bill from Telefónica, I didn’t kick up a fuss when she came back late from a trip into town wearing that necklace so obviously made to emphasize the curve of her breasts. It must be a pain to have a jealous husband, but apparently those are the things a real man grumbles about, and Helen was not about to accept anything less than the complete package:

“Aren’t I a jealous bitch for you?”

Of course, if I’d had a family to show her, happy or otherwise, I wouldn’t have put up such a fight. But all I had to offer were a few burned ruins. I tried to tell her, but I couldn’t find the right words, so we decided to start with Mother, a trip to Bonanova. I spent the night before the meeting in the kind of sleep that does nothing to restore you, tossing and turning until I bumped against Helen’s body. I kissed her neck to turn her on; even half asleep it wouldn’t take long to get her ready. I almost liked her better that way than when she was really excited, when she’d brazenly spread her naked thighs and the lips protecting the purple flesh, the coffer where she renewed her unique, particular aromas.

That morning wasn’t much different from any other day we began by making love (even though the appointed hour was waiting, as if the word “Mother” was wrapped up in butcher’s paper). Helen jumped out of bed naked, showered, brushed her teeth, chose her skirt and blouse while in her underwear. She got dressed as she boiled water for my tea (she never got the message that she should turn it off before it boiled), and one of our electric gadgets turned white bread into toast. She sat down to breakfast with the TV on, squeezing peanut butter from a toothpaste tube (a repugnant touch), and thumbing the salmon-colored pages of the previous day’s La Vanguardia. She’d offer some comment about the Catalan politics that she never could make sense of, waiting for me to pee and bathe and vacate the bathroom so she could go back in and tackle the thankless tasks of beautification: painting her lips, lining her eyes.

I put on a pair of jeans and a blue cable-knit sweater — I wasn’t going to do up twenty-one buttons to go and see my mother. The green dress hugged Helen’s skin with modest satisfaction, like she was the head of the class who doesn’t have to make an effort to stand out. She’d pulled her hair back with a double bow I can’t even begin to describe, and fastened the soft wisps with transparent clips.

“You’re not wearing a tie?”

And there we were, two young newlyweds who left their rings hidden away (together, though) in the drawer of a bedside table so as not to frighten my mother, and piled into the taxi carrying a stupendous bottle of sparkling wine and a jelly roll filled with cream — Helen’s American palate was bored with pa de pessic. We headed off toward the apartment I’d spent my teens in, where we’d moved from Madrid because that fucker Franco was about to die and my father smelled business opportunities in the air. We drove up Balmes and through the racket of the Mitre intersection, which only exists as a reminder of the horror that always lurks in cities. We left behind the imposing start of Avinguda Tibidabo, then passed an elephantine bus as it off-loaded dozens of passengers, all bundled up for the two or three days in which winter had decided to remind Barcelona it’s still a major European city. Finally, we came to the Passeig de la Bonanova and its grand, deep-set entranceways, where the array of neighborhood stores (sweet shops, sewing shops, modernist pharmacies) that composed the landscape of my youth had given way to franchises, banks, and private clinics. Helen was chewing spearmint gum and the radio issued a flamenquito murmur. As we passed a line of banana trees with pruned tentacles sprouting from their trunks I patted my pockets, afraid (and hopeful) that I had left my keys at home. My mother was more than capable of not letting us in.

Helen was fascinated by the elevator trick: the cage that opened directly into the foyer of the loft where we lived had always impressed the kids I brought to visit. It had the same effect on the posh girls who were my sister’s friends, the ones who once they grew up passed for the prettiest girls in Barcelona, in spite of their slightly bovine air, as if where there should have been that thing that makes sparks fly — the metronome of ambition — they only had a yawning void. They were made idle by the security of knowing things would go well for them, that this business of living was only serious for people less fortunate, and if they just coasted along then everything would be simple, they could succeed without getting their hands dirty. The truth is that when I called them to mind a decade later under the same cadaverous elevator light, I preferred Helen’s features, her rapacious look, those furrows of calculation wrinkling the corners of her eyes: a face that reminded me why I was with that person, and that I’d planned well.

“Too weird for your mother?”

I must have been staring. She thought I was censuring her for painting her eyes with those wine-tinted shades that must have been in style in some corner of the planet. To Helen’s mind, the goth palette of her eye makeup said something about what was proper and what was not — she was being bold. Well, my mother was weirder than Helen could possibly expect, and without trying: it came naturally to her.

When we got there, Mother had the nerve to greet us in the living room wearing the robe that had been her official uniform for five years. Her hair was matted in greasy tangles as if she were wearing a mop-inspired hat. I guess under all those layers of bewilderment — the result of the pills she took to flee the pain — she hadn’t even remembered we were coming. She was toying with her pillbox; I saw the chewed and peeled skin around her fingernails. I introduced them and we sat down. It bothered me to see her like that, and after five minutes I got up with the excuse of going to the bathroom. Helen wouldn’t mind being left alone with her: if women aren’t trying to claw out each other’s eyes, they’re turning blind ones to each other’s failings, and some neuron cluster had dumped a load of feminine solidarity all over Helen’s brain. As I walked down the hallway I admired the tolerance you women have for illness and decline. Sure, you’re the ones who have to let a polyp grow inside you, and then expel it once it can suck and feed itself on your secretions. But that doesn’t explain the bravery of those girls who, at twenty, can face raw and empty eye sockets, wounds that stretch from chin to thigh, jaws corroded by cancer.

The first room on the left was the “grandkids’ room.” I was surprised to see the light on. I stuck my head in to be sure it was still unfurnished: nothing but the sewing machine, the rococo mirror, and the small Miró Dad had bought me and that I felt uncomfortable taking with me to hang in the Turret. Not even a mysterious shadow; I flipped the light switch. I heard Helen’s voice gushing in her most melodious idiolect, and instead of going into the bathroom, I ducked furtively into my parents’ room. There was his bedside table, the damask-covered lamp, that showy clotheshorse he’d brought all the way from Sydney. It was all arranged as if he might come in at any moment, fold his glasses, and put on his robe. Nor had Mother removed the painting of that hunting scene; the oil had lost its shine, and even under the influence of the electric light a muddy, ocean-floor tone prevailed. I breathed in deeply, but I could barely catch a trace of Dad’s spicy, hot cinnamon scent. I opened the wardrobe and was startled to see a row of old suit jackets hanging above two halves of a ripening quince; the shoulder pads and wide lapels looked like they’d been designed to satisfy anatomical possibilities that had long since lost the evolutionary struggle. I also found two green knit ties with soft sienna striping. He hadn’t taken them, and she hadn’t thrown them away. I did not, however, find his old robe.

When my parents were in here, they would almost never summon me unless it was to scold me. As a child I’d liked to wander around their room when I was alone, ramrod straight, talking to myself: anticipating my entrance into the adult world, which I could only guess at then. During my teenage years I’d lie on that mattress with half a dozen weekend girlfriends, and we’d kiss like wrestlers locked in a struggle that almost brought us tumbling to the floor. The bed frame would — who knows whether from use or disuse — squeal like one of those old country locks, rusted and corroded. I can hardly believe it was the same place, and that twenty birthdays really go by, you leave home and follow new rules, ten years pass and another ten and, just like that, you’re over forty.

If I put my mind to it I could even taste that thick nipple sprouting from a vein so blue it was scary to think I could sever it with my teeth. The girl’s name, though, wouldn’t come. If I saw her now I’d recognize the fantastic hips that led only to a couple of flat buttocks dotted with red-tipped pimples — disappointing, yes, in terms of what I expect in a woman these days, after being spoiled by you and Helen. But back then they were just as exciting as those little eyes dying to please me, or the armpits where the poor, silly girl had forgotten to shave off the soft mat of hair. I’m almost sure that this freckle-face and I struggled with something — it must have been the clasp of her bra, because not even in my dreams could I have hoped that that afternoon would get us to the finish line, the point of sweetness and strain where beauty is penetrated.

I threw myself on her — which was my way back then — ready to devour that moment so overflowing with life and health. My hands sought out swells and zips, and for once it wasn’t my tongue but the girl’s that started thrashing around in my mouth, like she was trying to crush something. My saliva took on an acidic tinge. I couldn’t concentrate; I pushed her away and there was a sucking sound. She started to laugh, and she took her clothes off as if unwrapping the gift of her own flesh. She kept her panties on. I didn’t dare look below her waist, I didn’t want to scare her, I kept my eyes busy on her breasts, two uneven masses crisscrossed with a network of veins. Her eyes and the opening of her mouth suggested warmth and wetness, an internal wave swelled her like a water balloon, and even though I wasn’t overjoyed with the package as a whole, the heady aroma emanating from her clefts held me to her, and in the confusion I stared right between her thighs: a ridge of flesh pressing thickly and wetly against the cloth. I threw myself on the girl, turning her, I found her breast and I started to suck hard on its tip, I heard her laughter, her protests and other kinds of noises, but I didn’t let up, and while I grant that it was not a subtle maneuver, I don’t believe it deserved the spasms that preceded the first drops of liquid that started leaking, gushing, from within her — a watery, sticky geyser.

The torrent flowed for two minutes; my heart ran riot with confusion, and I started shaking. I was getting information at different speeds: I saw the frilly sound of her hair, I heard the snowy color of her flat behind creak, I couldn’t stand the incoherent cushiony scent of her armpits. I would have liked to blind my touch, suffocate my ears, shut my nose. Among the ideas that piled up in the bottleneck in my mind were: she was dying, the girl was mutating, she was going into labor. But when she finally stopped writhing, it turned out she only wanted me to hold her, to wrap her skin in my arms, rigid like two fish just taken from the freezer. I shook as I embraced her, I was a big body about to black out, I could feel hypothermia tingling in my feet. The girl felt the desperation of my hug, but she interpreted it wrong:

“It’s not pee, it’s just what happens to me. It’s natural.”

I lifted my head and saw that once again neither the laws of physics nor the guardian angels watching over us were going to lift a finger for me. The sheets were soaked in juicy secretions, a constellation of stains. It wouldn’t take much for my parents to move from that evidence to the suspicion that their son took advantage of their absence to hijack their bed for his first erotic adventures. I closed my eyes and watched my promising career as a weekend Casanova collapse. Good-bye to sexual advances with more appetizing feminine specimens: I’d been shut down by the vaginal fountain of a girl I wasn’t even taken with (and I do give myself credit for not bashing in her head while she was covering my neck in kisses). I will say in my defense that even if she’d had Helen’s kind of beauty, the kind that leaves you unsure whether to caress her or cover her skin in bites, deep relationships and emotions were out of the question. Is it the same with middle-class boys and girls? Up here we used to change girlfriends like shirts — all it took was a shower to clear your pores, free your body of lingering hairs and smells. Though you’d walk them down to the street when they got dressed to leave, or to the bus stop or home, none of those half-formed girls left anything behind to take root in your heart. It was enough to file away a name and a face that, as you matured, would become part of your blurry erotic prehistory. And it’s funny how none of that really prepares you for your first love, the one for whom you thought you’d been training your hands, your words, and your cock all that time.

“Where do your parents keep the sheets?”

She jumped up and put on some underpants that covered her entire backside (too scrawny to deserve the name “derrière,” whose lustful connotations made me feel faint) and that ever since then I associate with the flag of some impoverished country. I didn’t know where my mother kept the sheets, I’m not sure I could have even recognized a “bedspread,” I didn’t know techniques for covering mattresses, and since the most mature response I could offer to the vision of Dad’s curious finger moving over the dampness left by “my girl” was to throw a tantrum, I was grateful to the point of tears that she decided to ignore me and start opening and closing drawers in search of a set of the same color. When she found them, I hugged the Australian clotheshorse so she could remove the dirty sheets and fit the fresh ones with the same naturalness some people have when they pet strangers’ dogs. And although I was behaving like an idiot with defects in important areas of my brain, she had the courtesy to turn and offer me a smile. My hands were trembling too much to help with all that careful folding, so my contribution was to bundle the dirty sheets into a ball that I stuffed into her backpack. She promised to return them clean in two days. And that’s what she did, so well ironed and fragrant I had to crumple them a little so they’d pass for the kind of careless work our servants did.

“My mother trusts me.”

The incident gave us a feeling of camaraderie. I must admit that her fifteen years of experience had lent her a great deal of ease moving that big, friendly body of hers. The smile she gave me after her last invasive kiss announced possibilities that, consumed as I was by adolescent prejudices in favor of elegance, I’m sorry to admit I ignored. Anyway, I guess those memories aren’t worth all that much if I can’t even remember her name. I turned off the light and took my leave of the hunting scene that would remain hanging there until its very canvas rotted away.

Neither Helen nor Mother was complaining about my absence, so I went into the bathroom to freshen up. I loosened the knot of my tie, let the water run from the tap, and scrubbed my hands. There was something incredible about the fact that my parents had given me a life to occupy and I was still unable to remember the exact date that Dad left our apartment and my mother inside it. Don’t get me wrong, by that time it was barely my home anymore. My father had entrusted me with a sum of money, and I was thinking of using it to open a bar. I only went to Barcelona on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for my master’s degree classes; otherwise I moved around Madrid like a good catechism student repeating the plain facts that constitute all he knows and expects from society and its inhabitants.

Of course, they didn’t exactly summon me home to announce that he was leaving. It was a quiet process, with subtle outward signs, like when you slowly pull a bandage off hairy skin…you get the idea. Making a fuss wasn’t my parents’ style. They weathered any shocks and contrived to bottle them up in silence; they knew how to manage the ripples of emotion. If they ever fought, if they waged their own little wars, it all stayed within the walls of their bedroom. And Dad delayed the final separation by leaving behind books that were as much Mother’s as his, his music collection, most of his suits, his best pairs of shoes, and the letter opener with a faun carved into its marble handle. Mother had never opened a letter in her life, and though I didn’t dare take it with me to Madrid, I vainly fantasized that he’d left it in the drawer for me to find.

He never told us (never told me) where he had gone or with whom. Luckily my sister, who called me almost daily by reversing the charges from Boston (where she’d gone to live and from where she returned with halting English, determined to study something related to the arrangement of furniture), clarified the matter:

“Dad is a selfish pig. And if you don’t see that it’s because you’re nothing more than his lapdog who obeys after the first smack. Children are supposed to rebel against their parents, yell at them, reject their world to establish their own, storm out of the house, and slam the door behind them. But you, you still get choked up if he gives you a present, even if it’s your birthday, even if it’s the same thing he gave you last year. You’re like an appendix, a great big appendix, and you’ll only ever be independent if you actually manage to kill him with all your fussing.”

I tend to picture myself listening to my sister’s monologues (the stream of abuse barely let me get a few emphatic sighs in) in the Turret, but in those days I must have still been living in Madrid. Moving away from home made me feel rebellious — it was like being left alone in the dining room and sucking out a shrimp head filled with the juices of adult life. My spirit was too overstimulated for me to reproach Dad for anything. Months later, as I flew home from Madrid, soaring over stratonimbus clouds through which I could see the dense blue of the ocean, it would have been good to toy with the marble of the letter opener. Instead, my sweaty fingers clutched the leather handle of the briefcase where I’d stashed the innocuous-looking reports disclosing the waning profits of my first business. Which was really just ridiculous. I’d been educated so that things would go relatively well for us. I was going through a patch of human turbulence, and my parents’ separation made me feel less dense, as if the atoms that held molecules and cells and tissues together without ever touching each other had moved apart a few degrees in space: I was dematerializing. The anxiety had begun to manifest in a series of physical outrages: red spots, an itchy neck, a mocking wart on my shoulder blade. My parents’ love, the energy it had engendered, wasn’t enough to last an entire lifetime. Nor was it foreseeable that I would take the split so personally. Supposedly I was cutting the apron strings — what did I care whether they lived together or apart? As the sturdy plane moved onward over a narrower and narrower sliver of ocean, the outline of the Catalan coast began to show in relief, dominated by barrels, dry docks, containers, and those gangways of rock and mortar that bend into the water like insect legs. The plane turned inland on its route toward the runway, as if nothing were so important it couldn’t be left behind.

Dad only summoned me to “ask forgiveness” once there was no more hiding the separation. After that he started rationing himself, and I always had to be the one to chase him down with a barrage of phone calls. We stopped seeing him at Christmas and during Holy Week (which we used to celebrate properly, taking after the Mallorcan branch of Mother’s family). The real disappointment came when he didn’t bother calling on my birthday, an occasion that, more than twenty years before, had been one of the high points of his life: full of nerves, intensity, and expectations for a Joan-Marc who would be his and Mother’s almost completely.

Dad looked worse every time I saw him. I even flirted with the possibility that the reason behind his decline was that he missed us (missed me). He didn’t even have to act aloof: he was shielded by our good manners. During the years we’d lived together and I’d been his responsibility, Dad and I had developed a language that served well to communicate basic instructions, comment on current events, and cheer on Espanyol. But those conversational skills were no good for delving into each other’s “emotional makeup” (I got that phrase from your brother); the words became too quickly steeped in shame.

Again and again we would return to our traditional conversational territory and, a table always between us, he would update me on his health issues and digestive rhythms, on the stomach cramps that tightened the skin of his belly and left him with a residual pain he imagined as damp, like the trail of a slug. Sometimes I managed to forget that after talking and eating and paying (and after interrogating the waiter about the laxative or restrictive effects of the blue fruits peeking out between the layers of a puff pastry), Dad wouldn’t be walking back to the apartment. Instead, he’d head off in some unknown direction, to join other people who knew my name and other things about me, but who could never love me. If I didn’t try my hardest, Dad would become more and more distant, until he disappeared entirely. His paternity over me could not be taken for granted — if I didn’t work to keep his interest in me alive, I’d end up an orphan in all but name.

There were signs that made me suspect he’d moved in with someone younger, but over time I’ve developed serious doubts about my detective skills. The fine woven bracelet could have been a gift from one of his girlfriend’s adult daughters (my stepsisters — oh, what new and repugnant vistas familial upheaval opens up); nor could I know to what point the idea of the greedy young gold digger was clouding my vision and leading me astray. When all is said and done, Dad had spent two decades as a young man who didn’t know a thing about me or my sister, and now he was entering the next phase, when men who can’t bring themselves to believe in anything supernatural start to get a whiff of their mortality. Maybe he wanted to forget his kids a while, graft himself onto a different person, take a dip into novelty, adrenaline, rekindled emotion.

Dad had enough perspective to understand the contradictions of reinventing life in his fifties, but whatever my sister might say, it wasn’t his style to leave those clothes behind as an insurance policy to facilitate his eventual return. I like to think that Dad didn’t take his shoes, the Australian clotheshorse, or his favorite ties because he never really managed to leave — that given Mother’s “situation,” his ventricles would’ve gotten all twisted up if he’d ever truly abandoned her.

“John.”

Helen’s voice, skillfully negotiating the bend in the hallway, carried with it a sweet reproach. I’d left the water running too long; the sink was filling up. I opened the three mirrored cabinet doors in the bathroom; ever since I was a child I’d liked to focus them to reflect my image in an apparently infinite series. My face hadn’t changed much since I’d left home — it still wouldn’t have occurred to me to move the mirrors and make sure no areas of my skull were shedding any hair. I’d been married almost half a year (months during which I’d managed to shield my family from Helen’s social voracity), and the changes had all been on the inside. Our cohabitation was taking root in me: a common nervous system was forming that fed me with a different kind of energy, sweeping away the last residue of insecurity, strengthening me. But if I lay there at night and imagined something happening to Helen, someone hurting her, I would never get to sleep. I was implicated in her future, and I wasn’t sure that if the time ever came I’d be able to extract myself from the web of capillaries that emerged from one of us and spilled into the other.

“I’m coming! I saw something weird in the bathroom.”

“Cockroaches?”

“I’ll tell you in a second.”

Helen was obsessed with cockroaches. She fell back on all sorts of questionable statistics to warn me that Barcelona’s underground spaces were overflowing with the creatures, swarming in hordes like crunchy sheets, in search of cracks in pipes and kitchen walls where they could employ their astonishing reproductive abilities. I never saw any in my parents’ apartment, or at school or at any of my friends’ houses. I lived convinced that they’d been wiped out in Europe, but Helen’s eye was alert and terrified by the possibility of making contact with her first living specimen.

I ran some more water.

“Mother’s situation,” as it was called in our family shorthand, wasn’t ever even correctly diagnosed. One day, Mother rose decisively from the sofa and then collapsed with a violent pain in her ear. It didn’t go away after she fell, or once she was sitting, or standing, or when she covered her ears, not to mention the meager results from my father’s home remedies (lemon juice, or camomile and olive oil, or a mixture of chopped garlic and lavender). For half a week she couldn’t sleep, and she sobbed in exhaustion. The specialists we consulted ruled things out one by one: poor drainage in her Eustachian tubes, sinus infections, referred pain (which could originate in the teeth, the throat, or the tongue); they finally convinced themselves it was a problem with her inner ear. After all those examinations we still had no clear idea of what was going on inside Mother’s head. As the uncertainty grew, though, so did my conviction that the inner ear’s design is astonishingly exquisite — a membranous maze within a bony maze that with the help of cochlear fluid somehow transforms sonic waves into nerve signals. Something had gone wrong in those cartilaginous depths and was bathing my mother’s life in pain.

My father managed to divert a Chicago-based specialist from his conference for a few hours. He was forty years old with elegant, hairy hands, and he was delighted at having chosen a profession that enabled him to glide successfully around the world. His treacle-colored eyes gave off a cold boldness; in sum, he was the kind of Anglo-Saxon from whom you can expect nothing but the truth. I even liked how he received us in his shirtsleeves.

“There’s no damage to the organ. I suspect we’re dealing with imaginary pain.”

“When will it go away?”

“We don’t know why the brain imagines pain behind the ear, nor when it will stop. We don’t understand this behavior, and we can’t fix it. We cannot cure imaginary illness, you see? But patients can benefit from what we’ve learned about the brain’s geography to make the area emitting the commands go to sleep.”

“Will it stop hurting her?”

“She’ll stop believing she’s in pain.”

“Well then…?”

“You don’t need me for that, Mr. Miró-Puig. You can consult any general practitioner.”

The result of all those excuses and medical obscenities was some pills: white, blue, and red, a French flag. Three tablets that offset each other’s negative side effects, and kept the patient (my mother!) within the fairly unambitious bounds of what those people consider “healthy.” I don’t really know how it all happened because I had play-offs (thirty-six points and we crushed the Marista team on their own court, three socks supporting the swelling left ankle I twisted in the first quarter). Also because I’d spent a week sweating in fear, convinced I’d be the next one to have some hidden element of my body give out.

“She hardly ever complains. She smiles, but it looks painted on.”

“The doctor says there’s pressure on the nerves that feed her brain.”

“She stayed under the sheets like she was waiting for something.”

Though she recovered from the pain in her ear (or at least stopped complaining about it), the pills dulled her spirits into hibernation. She didn’t care if it was one thing or the other, and she dwindled away so much she seemed incapable of tending to her own basic needs. And that was how a diluted version of my mother settled unannounced into the landscape of our family life. Equidistant from health and sickness, from affection and indifference toward her children, from independence and dependence, she was the woman whose husband both abandoned and did not abandon the home they shared.

The first thing we thought when Dad took off was that, with a son in Madrid and a daughter in Boston, she was going to starve to death. What no one saw coming was that my father would travel from wherever the new center of his activity was, to bring her food and cigarettes (which my mother still had not learned to do without), to clean the apartment (we now have a very Peruvian cleaning lady) and prepare plates of food that could be reheated in the microwave. He was also the one to scour the pharmacies for her tricolored chemical fix. When my sister and I forgot to replenish Mother’s pills she would start humming, writhing like a cat in a bag and scratching herself (one Tuesday I was impressed to see red marks crisscrossing her neck), but we never thought it was anything terribly urgent. Until one afternoon something scared her, and she started talking in a voice borrowed from the little girl in The Exorcist about how much better off the rest of the Miró-Puig family would be if she just kicked the bucket. According to Dr. Strangelove (I’ve lost track of all the doctors we visited), the center governing her consciousness (as if those idiots knew where that is, or what the hell they were talking about) switched off when its demand for lithium went unsatisfied. Then her lips just started moving independently, uninhibited by affection, to transmit the viscous poison that stirred in the secret depths of my mother’s brain — a woman who, two years earlier, could justify spending an entire day sweetly sewing on a button. Dr. Death’s proposed solution wasn’t bad: make her dependence chronic. And we were so frightened, so naive, that we received the proposal like good news. We were a hair’s breadth away from throwing a welcome party for the zombie state that lasted for the next fifteen years. Anyway, after that my father also took care of organizing the capsules into a pillbox that distributed doses by days. Then he’d help her fix her hair, and then he’d leave.

“I guess he couldn’t afford full-time help anymore.”

And there you have the oh-so-nuanced version that my sister gave, sitting there on the sofa in the little house Dad had rented for her, with its views of the Charles River. There may have been a twelve-digit number between us, but how easy it was to imagine her moving that big mouth of hers, right above the frog-like double chin she gets whenever she tries to pass for a rational person.

“Just tell me why else he’d sink so low.”

But it didn’t seem to me like Dad was lowering himself. I figured he felt an intermediate kind of love for Mother: not ample enough to deprive himself of the transfusion of new life he was enjoying (or so we suspected), nor so exhausted he could just throw his old life overboard. Regardless, if God decides to remake the earth one day with a little more intelligence and forethought, we’ll all be better off if he opts to use my father’s tender patience as a model.

How could I complain? How could I ask him for explanations? Instead I chose just to be grateful he didn’t tell all three of us— incapable of earning a peseta of our own, our parasitic tentacles so well developed — to take a long walk off a short pier. I visited a lawyer on the sly to ask whether, if I got into a jam, I could demand my inheritance through registered fax. I loved (I love) Mother, but my world revolved around parties and the basketball court. If those things didn’t overextend me, I had plans to take advantage of the familial inertia to open a little business of my own; my hands weren’t made for nursing. Of course, “Mother’s situation” barely caused me any anxiety — it was more like a power outage. If she complained about anything, it was that Dad took up too much space in the apartment, that she couldn’t stand his chatter about business, that she’d grown tired of his voice and his conversation. If I found out someday she was the one who threw him out, it wouldn’t exactly be the surprise of my life.

I came out of the bathroom and resisted the urge to look at the room that, if I were ever to find myself separated from it by an ocean and its three billion fish, would still be mine. From the hallway door I could see my mother’s dear face trying to smile, and her hands embraced by Helen’s young fingers. The light, reduced by the glass into shades of green, illuminated particles and bacteria; around those two women, the micro-universe of the air orbited in slow ellipses.

“We’d better get going.”

And that was my great contribution to the soirée. I didn’t deign to spend more than five minutes with the three of us together. It didn’t matter to me if some pleasant exchange was going on between Mother’s glassy gaze and the compassionate blue shade glinting in Helen’s eyeballs. I knew all about the therapeutic value of physical touch to cheer up the patient, but that kind of preplanned fondling only seemed phony to me. It was just that we were never a very effusive family…it was just that the cream was melting out of the pastry in repugnant waves…it was just that my mother must have been tired, that the slice of the past she’d retrieved from her mental depths was enough; I needed to get back to my grown-up life. Helen rode the elevator down with her head lowered, ruminating on something that spelled trouble for me, I was sure; I merely tightened my tie, insinuating the magnitude of my displeasure through my body language, hoping to intimidate her. I wasn’t going to stand for any little moral lessons — if Helen wanted to play at that, she could start with the elk back in Montana. I prepared myself for a fight, and a full-blown one at that.

I opened the door for her and I let her go out first. By the way she moved her ass in that dress (the coat folded over her arm: another sign), I realized she wasn’t looking for a fight. She took my arm, pressed against me, kissed my neck.

“I’m so sorry about your father.”

She moved away, and with her feet perched atop those high heels she’d mastered at fourteen, she raised her arm to hail a taxi. She arched her body until the stretchy cloth of her dress displayed what well-mannered boys would call her “figure”: the voluptuous innocence of her curves. She reminded me then of her generous fullness as a woman in love, keen to make up for all the bad that had ever happened to me or the people I cared about, and she did it with a purity and guile that effortlessly laid me bare.

I’d also been riding in a taxi with leather seats the time I went on my first and last visit to Dad’s secret lair. I hadn’t heard from him in four months, and when he finally phoned me in Madrid, I had to hold back the tears. I made an effort not to mention that my bar was done for, that there was a chasm in its floor and all the money was draining out. A little loan to tide me over wasn’t going to cut it. I’d let it go for too long, and the unpaid bills were piling up. I needed at least a million pesetas to stem the bleeding.

“Son, how are you? I’d like to see you.”

“It’s so good to hear from you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, I don’t know if…”

“I want to tell you something — it’s fairly pressing, would you mind coming to see me?”

“At your office?”

“No. I’ll give you an address. Do you have paper?”

“What I was going to say is that I’ve had some problems, if we could—”

“We’ll talk about it on…how about Friday?”

“Couldn’t it be sooner? It’s a substantial problem, it’s about the bar…”

I’d managed to warn him about my business blunder without uttering a word about Mother. And there you have my true talent: the quitter, that’s me, and I’m not surprised he didn’t care about seeing me. In contrast, Dad was like an iron rod, conducting the conversation exactly as he’d planned.

“Don’t worry about that now. There are going to be big changes. I won’t be ready on Thursday. Better on Friday, at seven fifteen. Are you writing this down?”

“Ready.”

It was a street I didn’t know.

“Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Read it back.”

I racked my neurons — a city’s streets disappear when you’ve been gone for months, but no, I’d never heard that name in my life.

“I’ll make dinner, you bring the wine.”

Red, earthy, with mature tannins — I didn’t need to ask.

“Dress up. Seven fifteen. You know I like to see you in a tie. Until Friday, then, Joan-Marc. Buy the ticket today.”

“See you Friday, Dad. Bye.”

When I hung up, my arm was trembling. A grown man of twenty with a five-day-old beard, about to finish a master’s in something related to the labor yield of other people, my two suits bought at Bel’s…all held together by a nervous system that let itself be intimidated by the voice of that dry but friendly man who’d never raised a hand against me, who assumed my failures with a savoir-faire known only in Frank Capra films. I guess I turned then to those things that are so banal when you write them down: I made a cup of tea, plopped onto the sofa, went to another room, sat looking out the window — the aerials, gas cylinders, air-conditioning units, and dirty café awnings (white, green, maroon). I imagined what my father’s spacious apartment would be like — white furniture, plump cushions, lavender diffusers — and the people who might live with him.

I suppose I loved the man, and I’d enjoyed the manly embrace of his love when he had circulated among us, clean and noble. I used to feel delirous with happiness when he took me to see a football match at the old Sarriá stadium and told me stories about Marañon, the forward with such veiny legs, or when he studied art books so he could impress me the next day at the museum, or when he taught me to ride a horse, when he failed to pass on his passion for polo. I missed having him walk me to La Salle and repeat like a premature grandfather his theory about the benefits of a deep cleanse for a healthy gut. I missed his sartorial flourishes: the corner of a handkerchief peeking from his jacket pocket, the white leather gloves he put on when he drove, the bow tie he wore to make my sister laugh (but that I’d bet anything he longed for a good opportunity to sport in earnest). I miss his way of defusing problems, of looking at Mother, of tempering my outbreaks of insecurity, of falling asleep with a book in his hands on the sofa in the living room, in poses that would have horrified him if he’d seen himself with waking eyes; I miss the deep snoring that Mother called “the walrus attack,” his fingers smudged with ink from the newspaper, the disciplined disgust with which he dedicated himself to his vegetarian diet, the annoyance that accompanied his exit from the bathroom after falling off the wagon again, defeated by constipation and the effect of the word “constipation” on his mood. I missed the chemical odor of deep waste that he left in the bathroom like the sign of a partial victory in his prolonged battle with his insides. My only shame came from having grown until I was twice his size. I blushed at the size of my hands, my well-defined muscles; my feet and bones had grown, my face had caught up with my adolescent growth spurts and stabilized into fairly harmonious features. If what is expected of a son is confrontation, antagonism, and bust-ups, don’t hold your breath: I adored my father, and I missed him. If only he would take custody of me again!

I guess I closed the curtains, I guess I took a sip of tea, left the mug on the table. What I’m sure about is that my delight at the prospect of seeing Dad again was curdled by the fear that all those little secrets were advance warning of some devastating news: that he was going to stop taking care of Mother, that she and her pills and her cigarettes would from then on be my responsibility (those cold fingers moving over my hand were Helen’s, and they belonged to the time frame in which a taxi driven by a raving lunatic was taking us from the apartment on Bonanova back to our Turret).

I bought an Australian wine made from grapes grown in the twisted vineyards of Adelaide, fed by a field so old the sun was already beating down on it when the rest of today’s dry land was ocean floor, a wine rich in tannins and licorice overtones. Believe it or not, I was also uncomfortable at the thought he might have invited me over so he could apologize and return home to live. I chose a beige suit with very fine green stripes that I thought would please him. Of course, I suspected that all the fuss about the bottle of wine and looking sharp was to soften the blow of the news that he was going to get married, give me a sibling, introduce me to another mother, all of which provoked a disgust I couldn’t choke down just by tightening the knot of my tie. My aversion wasn’t based on anything rational: I felt the same way about pepper, or cauliflower’s smell of rotting vegetation. I got the creeps at the mere thought of our bloodlines branching out: the glut of a species in all its excess, and the haughty disdain toward individual specimens. It’s like when you kick over a rock and see the hundreds of rasping insects that never mange to join forces to work together coherently. What a waste.

I was already dressed when I looked for the address among the onionskin pages of a city street guide. It was an odd street that cut behind Lesseps. This is back when the plaza was still a giant planning disaster that separated Gràcia from Vallcarca, as if the Mississippi River were flowing between the two sidewalks. I drew myself a map. I’d said good-bye to Mother (who from the back looked like a doll abandoned on a chair, streaks of white winding through her chestnut hair), but then I went back to the kitchen for the marble-handled letter opener, unsure whether my plan was to keep it or return it to Dad. Google Maps didn’t exist yet to check the address, and I got worried when the taxi headed into an area of low houses and kitchen gardens (I thought I saw the phantasmagorical shapes of some chickens). Then I discovered that my father had moved (or at least summoned me) to a single- family home with a garage.

I was twenty minutes early, so I went into a bar crammed with patrons whose faces were round and dry. I ordered a strong coffee; I lifted my hand to check my watch and found a naked wrist. I felt underdressed, informal, and the odd thing is that since that day I’ve never worn one again, as if a moment of time has refused to pass. The rest of the scene: revolving fan blades, the slot machine, the posters of Extremaduran football teams, family photos, a laminated cardboard menu dominated by fried food, the formaldehyde smell of cheap booze. But these could all be the kind of details we add to the texture of deep memories, the ones that have been keeping us company for years.

I went outside, and an ambiguous feeling descended on me. I only had to cross the street and say hello to my father, one half of the familial mass that had conspired to bring me into the world. I rang the doorbell for ten minutes until it occurred to me to try the door; it opened. I went in fearlessly, which I put down to my sense of smell reacting faster than my eyes, capturing the notes of firewood, cinnamon, and rancid wine that mingled to make up my father’s trademark scent.

An opaline light filtered through the fibers of the drawn curtains, gradually overcoming the darkness until I could make out the outline of the furniture. And then I saw two chairs covered in old leather, and on a table of American pine sat the same lamp with the damask shade; there was the very same Australian clotheshorse. Dad had reconstructed his corner of the bedroom down to the last detail. I found his glasses right where they should be, with their thick lenses and golden arms, and the same almanac with the results of the last fifty runnings of the Ascot Derby that he consulted like a prayer book. The space was different, and that was the only reason it took me a few moments to understand that the room was arranged like an altar to his old life.

There was a doorway that led to a room dominated by a large four-person sofa, and that’s where I found him, swinging from the ceiling like any dead thing swings. His feet, bare and calloused, hung at the height of my throat.

You’ve heard of time-lapse photography? When they take photos at intervals from a single point of view, then project the images sped up, so processes that might take hours pass in just a few seconds. I’m sure you’ve seen how a few wispy clouds suddenly gather to form a storm; well, that’s the only way I can remember that taxi ride with Helen, as a succession of images played in an accelerated filmstrip.

“I like your mother.”

“You poor thing, poor little John.”

“I’m just what your family needs.”

“You look handsome. Let’s not go home. I want to watch you drink, dance, shine.”

The Eixample, Raval, Paral-lel, all lit up with fluorescent signs, those narrow streets that lead up toward Montjuïc with names that everyone learns, the statue of Columbus, the little plaza of sand at Medinaceli, the Moll del Rellotge, the Estació de França before they restored it, the fence of the Ciutadella surrounding masses of dark vegetation….Patches of urban geography that already existed for the people who were breathing when that new conscription of children appeared, in a formation that I (so protected, such a splendid future ahead of me) confused with a permanent state of affairs. We crossed Barceloneta, the facades of those buildings that look transplanted from the Eixample, the smell of stir-fry and the juice of grilled shrimp, the garlic that no longer bothered Helen now that we were in Barcelona. We ordered another drink at a beachside stall where we watched the sea’s edge lick itself. A fresh breeze seemed to fall from heavens infested by stars hidden from us by sheets of gases, all knitted together to protect us: our speed, our fearless lives. I entertained myself taking sips of gin and tonic — sips like sweet knives — that were cold at first and then burned my stomach. A stray beach dog came up to us and Helen bent down to pet its nape with a familiarity that startled me, and when she turned around to look at me I noticed that the luminous blue of her eyes was formed by strata and filaments of different shades, and I felt responsible for her happiness, her serenity, as if the contact between Helen and my mother had widened the circle of my affections, the territory of the familiar. A nut was dancing about on the plate before me and I lifted it to my mouth. I suppose there was a bit of me that had never taken the marriage seriously, and up until that moment I’d had myself convinced we were only joking, and I could turn back anytime.

He hadn’t turned yellow, he didn’t stink, it was just his insistence on spinning around like a pendulum of human meat. The mass of muscle and liquids possessed a dark gravity, and I, its son, began to orbit around it in obsessive parabolas, captive, biting my nails, raising my hands to cover my eyes every time he faced me, avoiding contact with features swollen as if a pulp of chopped hamburger meat were straining against the transparent skin of his forehead and cheeks. I could recognize him from behind, too: the organism was broken, inside him the blood was rotting, his pulmonary membranes were drying up, I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t stop it. I must have circled him twenty times, clapping like a madman; primitive emotions tore at my head and derailed my thoughts before they could reach any practical conclusion. I could only interrupt my obsessive circling by taking off my clothes, piece by piece, not stopping until I was naked (except for my underwear, which I left on out of respect for Mother — my whole family was watching me, a disaster of that magnitude couldn’t be ignored).

I suppose the sensible thing would have been to catch my breath, take a look at what was in the green accordion file with the corners of several folders peeking out, on which Dad had stuck a label with my name: Juan. A dead man’s handwriting, the last word with all its magical echoes. But instead I searched my coat for the letter opener; giving it to him was no longer an option, nor could I return it to Mother, sullied as it was by that atmosphere of death. I could, however, still drive it into the wine bottle and destroy the cork; I didn’t give up until the liquid flowed freely, and then I took a swig straight from the bottle. I lay down on the sofa in a fetal position and started spitting out cork fragments. I must have spent two hours like that; I don’t think I ever fell asleep. The light was suffocated as the alcohol (the flavor of red kangaroo herds crossing the desert, of blooming hibiscus and capricious coral reefs overflowing with creatures that don’t ever miss mature consciousness and its complicated games) gradually polished my raw emotions into a smooth self-indulgence. I caressed its hide, like that of an ugly animal with yellow fangs, companion to our worst moments. I suppose I knew they would take him away and incinerate him, they would take him from me and I would never see him again. How short it all is. At times I raised a sentimental gaze to take in his remains. The web of character that I associated with Dad was gone, but those were his arms, his hands, his cartilage; that skin was the material remnant that death doesn’t know how to strip away, the only thing that could resist its mild, lifeless touch. I was his only son. Why is it so hard to understand that I wanted some time alone with him?

I must have dozed off after all, because I eventually opened my eyes to overwhelming darkness. The sofa was giving off the same unmistakable leathery odor as his jacket, and as I drifted into a peaceful drowse, I heard the whisper of traffic passing outside, a soothing rhythm from which I was jolted awake by the thunder of a motor that faded without dying away completely, like it was driving down a never-ending street. I lifted my head, and the spongy calluses on his feet reminded me that Dad was still hanging from the ceiling.

I got up, fumbled around on the wall to find the little wheel that controlled the recessed lights; a luminous dust began to fall. I don’t know what was going through my mind or what time I thought it was, but when I opened the curtains it was already dark outside, and I was blinded by a white burst, like a flashbulb. When I recovered, I shuddered to think what any insomniac neighbors and the last drinker in the bar would see from across the street: a man standing in his underwear, and a hanged man in silhouette against the violet shadow.

I drew the curtains, but I kept looking out through a gap I held open with my fingers. I’d never noticed how light falling from the streetlamps scatters a layer of golden scales over the pavement. The traffic was easing off; when a car passed slowly by, I tried to narrow my eyes at just the right moment to make its headlights leave an electric filament suspended in the air. Dad liked to collect old telephones, postcards, hookahs, cast-iron junk. All that stuff must have been there but I didn’t look for it; instead, there was that shining pavement spread with a greasy layer of damp. It was warm. I knew he drank cherry brandy but I never found out if those people, the cherry brandy drinkers, keep a bottle in the house to fall back on some Sunday, or on a long weekend when the shops are closed, or if for some reason they can’t leave the house. I turned to ask him, but then I heard the chugging of a car’s engine. I ran to the window, and got there only in time to see the lights moving away. Instead, a motorcycle went by so slowly that its wheels left a trail of water on the pavement. He’d liked flannel and dark green shirts, and when I started looking around I found, beside his bed, some flannel pajamas. I also realized that when the cars got to the end of the street, they started driving more calmly, as if beyond that road’s aura the city were dozing; I took it as a sign of respect. The room was permeated with the smell of reheated resin instead of his Chypre cologne: an affectation, like the pure tobacco he smoked, exhaling rings as impeccable as the silk scarf knotted around the open neck of his shirt. The wide range of his tastes, always so elegant except when something upset him and turned his skin pig-red. I was already fairly uneasy at the way the recessed lights beat against the plaster, but when I saw that SEAT car approaching with its headlights off, there was nothing to do but throw myself at Dad’s body: I emptied the pockets of his trousers, his shirt and his jacket (standing on a stool), and I found two handkerchiefs, some old cards, and a handful of greasy coins. I gathered it all into a little pile, and then I separated the things and returned them one by one to the welcoming recesses of cloth. Not that he was going to miss them, but I had the impression that my father was still adapting to peace, that there was no reason to deprive him of the objects he had chosen to take with him as he crossed.

I turned on all the lights to look for the telephone. I dialed the number in Boston, and while I listened to the full range of whistles as it connected, I picked up the green file to distract myself from the beloved weight growing stiff in the middle of the room. I couldn’t even think of calling my mother.

“Dad?”

It troubled me that my sister recognized the number of this place I’d known nothing about, but the circumstances won out. I had to tell her; I was surprised at how easily my private pain flowed out of me, forming itself into ordinary words to circulate in shared space.

I had to contain my sister over the phone. Or rather, I lent my ear to her emotional dam-burst until (fifteen minutes later) she was finally empty. Her gurgling tirades weren’t for listening to; it was enough that someone endure them, so I kept myself entertained imagining the creamy blotches on her cheeks dancing as her offended doll’s face contorted. Having invoked Dad’s selfishness, I was shaken when she immediately started bemoaning how he had done “this” to her, that he’d turned against her long ago, that he’d never gotten over his distaste at having spawned a daughter with a mind of her own. It was exactly what she would have screeched as a preteen if a twisted ankle kept Dad from driving us to the summerhouse. It’s amazing to think about how she managed to go through life without learning a thing, how she could just let it all pass her by the second she became an adult. Mentally, my sister was still a wily fifteen-year-old.

Still, I could have been more of a help when she started to shriek that Dad’s suicide covered the Miró-Puigs in opprobrium (my word, but it more or less summarizes her feelings). It was such an outdated attitude; Michael Jackson still hadn’t been declared Man of the Year for staying home and dying, but all signs were pointing in that direction. I didn’t calm her down, I brushed her off, I’d had enough. It took me two months to realize that Dad’s inheritance was a dying star, a situation that may or may not have been linked to his decision to do himself in, to deprive us of his presence, to withdraw his counsel from our lives. It was almost a year before I suspected that those negative balances had accumulated enough dark energy to implode in a black hole. And don’t forget in the middle of the whole mess I read my name on that label; the knowledge that Dad had chosen me to heat up the family’s financial oven again acted as my anchor, it stabilized me. I didn’t even think about the fact that the poor guy had no alternative. They say that when a parent dies, you open a previously undiscovered eyelid that had always protected you from seeing the dark face of the void. But I didn’t have time for such disgusting conjectures: my father’s blood was staining his remains as his capillaries burst, transforming the man who’d just pushed me onto the stage of adult life into a sinister clown.

I tried to reach an agreement with Dad. I decided to believe, without submitting to any belief system in particular, that his consciousness would not disperse, but would go on wandering the earth with his mind almost intact, receptive and able to hear me whenever I talked to him. It wasn’t in my best interest if he could just watch me any time he wanted, of course. Not that I worried about him observing my more intimate moments (death would have to change him a lot before he’d glimpse his son and Helen half naked and not avert his eyes). No, I was more troubled at the thought of him spying on my conversations with Mother, or my domestic arguments, or my botched job with Passgard. His sticking around could be a complicated business, crisscrossed with shadows. I decided to believe he could only make contact with my reality when I summoned him. It was, naturally, too capricious an agreement ever to be taken seriously.

Before leaving and shutting the door behind me, spitting out wine-soaked cork particles, I started opening and closing drawers until I found the robe I hadn’t seen him wear since my mother told him she’d had enough of him walking around the house in that rag. An animal instinct made me thrust my snout into the folds of cloth. It smelled of tobacco and old clothes, of little-aired material; only deep within it did a more personal layer unfold, one that could call up no other name but his. And as the scent moved from my nostrils to the crown of my brain, it reminded me of the softness of his manners, so incapable of offending, and the speed with which his eyes would grow calm after he said something cross, as if they wanted to rid themselves of an emotion that was too muddy, too coarse. It was a habit that for years I’d confused with a cold compassion. Now I understand it came from the way he held his feelings in check: methods of emotional management that I neither inherited nor will ever learn. Character traits that were as much his as the line of his lips, the shape of his knees, his fingerprints.

I took the robe with me.

“You really didn’t think to take him down?”

Even Helen had the nerve to reproach me, her feet buried up to the ankles in sand as we passed back and forth the bottle of murky wine the bar had lent us in exchange for a blue note. Of course, she wasn’t the one who’d had to confront our family’s financial wasteland. As I started to unravel the catastrophe Dad left behind, things weren’t so bad in the practical sense: I paid the bar’s debts, I convinced myself we had enough property, I didn’t have to worry too much, Mother wouldn’t end up on the streets and my sister could find whatever she had gone to Boston to look for. It was an interpretation with more text, you might say, but it was still a valid one. The only company that wasn’t boiling in bad debt paid me a salary: I bought suits, shirts, ties, and a pair of shoes so soft I miss them still.

They were emotional days. I pretended to be strong for Mother’s benefit, organized the funeral, went to the lawyer, signed papers and checks. I had two conversations with the regional director of the bank, I bought a coffin for Dad and went with him to the incinerator, and while his carcass burned I focused on sending him supportive vibes. I’m not sure that his ashes could hear my thoughts, but it never hurts to try. Why not admit it? I was sedate, contained, so suave in my three-piece suit, the feel of my black tie so pleasant. But there were all kinds of turbulent emotions teeming inside me. But I’d had enough of the joke: the only humane end to that whole performance was for Dad to get up from the casket. And if that resurrection was too theatrical for the heavenly powers that be, I’d have been happy just to find him at home in the living room, his legs crossed and his eyes buried in his almanac.

Among the swarming emotions, a cautious, paranoid current had begun to flow when I saw the calluses on Dad’s feet. And I couldn’t look away from the sad yellow enamel, corroded right down to his cuticles. Dad had plenty of defects (though I can’t think of any right now), but no one can deny that he always looked his best. He taught me the difference between stylish clothing and clothes that were truly elegant, that I shouldn’t wear button-down collars with a tie, and never to unbutton my cuffs. He taught me how to choose a good spencer, how to combine the wide range of beiges and sandy shades, to lose all respect for the color yellow, to value a Ferragamo design, and to take off my hat with my right hand when I greeted someone (a flourish whose academic equivalent would be to study a dead language). So for weeks, the state of his toenails and their shameful exposure drove me to suspect that someone had murdered him. My father’s idea of a discussion about ethics included recommending a dental checkup and a reminder to wash one’s hands before (as well as after) urinating. He was certainly not one to shrink from talking about his physical ailments. He embarrassed my mother and sister no end, because he didn’t seem to consider anyone enough of a stranger to spare them updates on his heart or intestinal issues. I understood them, of course I understood their mortification when he couldn’t resist telling some total stranger (a cashier, the mechanic, one of those people who look after cars in the plaza) all about the frequency and strength of his stomach cramps. I especially understood them when, without telling anyone and with my face burning, I swiped a personal notebook Dad had used to keep track of his bathroom visits, annotated with precise impressions of each evacuation. On the other hand, they should have known that if we’d been able to listen comfortably to his health problems, he wouldn’t have had to embarrass us by subjecting neighbors and friends to those interrogations, in search of a little solace and complicity. We just never understood that his chattiness about bodily functions (veins, stomach cramps, gases, intestines) was the other side of his grooming: the basic preoccupations of a life.

If I let the murder idea slide, if I never managed to consolidate a sordid theory, it was thanks to my inability to imagine any context in which a murderer would take the trouble to hang my father and then remove his socks, which I found a few days later beside the bed. As I calmed down (that is, as the growing avalanche of financial worries sidelined any troubles that didn’t reek of money), I understood that the most shocking aspect of that scene — which had branded itself white hot into my heart, and if I’m honest I don’t think it will ever cool — was to think that Dad had neglected and ignored his nails long enough to let them turn into those rough, lemon-colored claws. Something had been pounding at him pretty hard for almost a year to make him disregard what mattered most to him in life. It was more forgivable for him to have overlooked the fact that, once he was hanging from the ceiling, his nails would be floating level with my eyes (assuming he had indeed planned for me to find him). After all, when a guy is thinking about killing himself, he can’t have many things on his mind, but they sure as hell must be absorbing.

“I’m going to be your sister’s best friend, John. Your sister needs a best friend, there’s no denying that.”

My sister’s favorite activity was keeping a detailed catalogue of my defects and mistakes. At some point she’d decided that I was an utterly hopeless idiot, and in spite of the condescension she’d found it necessary to display ever since, her sentence had been liberating for both of us. It was strange, if you think about it. We were both children of a crazy mother and a suicidal father (the very same ones, in fact!), and we’d both unexpectedly been left penniless: we should have gotten along quite well. The fact that I’d ended up painted as the hopeless one and she as levelheaded was a dirty trick of the gender distribution of roles. It was me (so much for any feminist sentiment) they sent as the family’s representative, me who stood before the board of specialists who bled us with the fees they charged for exercising their incompetence. “Circumstances,” they said. “Our hands are completely tied,” they said. And they called themselves professionals! Seriously, I’d been brought up to manage my life within a range of pretty comfortable circumstances. They hadn’t prepared me to survive in the wild. I was created (and I say this swallowing my pride) to be a comic character. I didn’t even hear the death knell when they recommended I invest in cheese.

But you’ll hear no more from me about that. Let the gossip dogs scrabble at other graves; the behind-the-scenes story of the Miró-Puigs’ descent into the pestilential waters of modest circumstances is the part I’ve decided to skip, while Helen and I dance in close-up. My mental well-being depends on me keeping some limits on the humiliation, and I will not…

Lawyers, administrators, consultants, notaries (words whose common root is “shamelessness”) put food on their tables by not solving your problems! Imagine if a “good” dentist, one who could afford a clinic on Via Augusta, was the one with the audacity to hide from his “patient” (this wit of language!) that he let his molars rot rather than lose him as a “customer.” You turn to specialists thinking that with their vast knowledge they can help you, and you’re taken in by con artists, cheats, illusionists, snake-oil salesmen, armchair generals, suit-and-tie-wearing malingerers (and what ties!); the only thing they give you are doses of hope, and we love hope so much that we send numbers full of zeros to their accounts, so they can assure us that our affairs are looking healthy and beautiful. I said to them: “You people are professionals, advise me how to put my business back on a good footing. And while you’re at it, please resuscitate my father.” Which they heard as: “Masters of illusion, please lessen my agony by helping me to dispense with my money as quickly as possible!” So many years at school, the institute, at university, those shoddy master’s programs….What would really have helped me was for someone to teach me how to manage my turbulent desires, my rebellious body, the maddening ideas I had and the sensory overload that one of these days will drown me — a reality tutor, now that would be priceless.

While they were taking what they imagined as my manly strength of character and squeezing it for all it was worth, it took my sister three months to find the man of her dreams. Mauro — get this! — Mauro Sanz Popovych, born of a mother from Ukraine or somewhere worse, was a professional jeweler and had a look about him that justified resurrecting the word “namby-pamby” in everyday conversation. I swear I made (almost) no comment, I tried not to raise an eyebrow. If I betrayed anything it was down to the spontaneous twitchings of strange muscles in my eyelids and my chin. It’s also true that Popo really needed no comment.

“You choose your girlfriends according to impractical criteria. You look for physical qualities, or intellectual ones — although not with this latest girl. And don’t go telling me how my husband is worse or you’ll be stepping in some shit. I know there’s nothing exceptional about him — that’s part of what makes him an excellent companion. You can’t base a marriage on an interesting person and expect it not to fail. People you’ve truly loved become annoying once your sights are set somewhere else. My motto is: leave the most interesting stuff for outside the house. I’m in no danger with Mauro, I assure you, his talent is to be insipid. And just so you’re clear I’m not at all jealous of Helen’s ‘glow,’ I’d encourage you to go find yourself a real teenager. Helen’s already showing her age in those big hips, she’s like a double bass. And of course I care about you, Juan, but you know how my life is, I don’t have the time to tell you all this tactfully.”

She’d jumped from our family ship as it was going down, to become the wife of a social-climbing jeweler. That’s when she started working in her current field: something between earring design and pastry criticism, it’s never been entirely clear. Like all women tend to do when a situation gets hairy and grows claws, she let herself fall happily back into the old chauvinistic routines: cultivate your femininity, become deserving of love — the world is full of men who don’t turn up their noses at flab, at bad tempers, at spoiled-little-girl whims, so just let yourself be seduced by a handsome gentleman (ha!) who won’t save you with a kiss, but with the wind in the sails of his burgeoning career. If your bedroom isn’t as exciting as that of some mechanic’s favorite girl when he comes home hungry from the garage, we can fix that: it makes more sense to change bodies than houses. Not to mention it’s much cheaper.

Of course, it was one thing for my canny sister to succeed in keeping the penthouses, cars, vacations, and the butchers at the Planas plastic surgery clinic…and quite another to be blind to the yawning gulf between the cushy life she would have lived with the money we’d thought Dad had and, well…life with Mauro. There you have a plausible reason for why her savage hatred for our father has never cooled. And after Dad packed in this worldly life, she started channeling all that contempt my way. She probably figured out pretty quickly that I was not the hero destined to rescue us from Dad’s tangled legacy; she lost all respect for me, and she didn’t mind undermining me in public.

“You should have learned by now to shut up, Juan. The least you can do is not interrupt when someone serious is talking.”

The truth is that I went along with everything my sister said. I didn’t rebel, I never even considered arguing with her, because there was a gaping and sorrowful mandorla spread open between the two of us, and also because I’ve never felt comfortable in the role of abuser.

In short: my sister suffered from a problem that would keep her from ever being a mother. She’d inherited a variant of Dad’s intestinal pestilence (like the white birthmarks that parents pass on to their children through their genes, depositing them on different areas of their bodies), which, as luck would have it, ended up in her reproductive organs. Salpingitis, gonorrhoea, I never really knew. It was one of those stories that go on and on, half hidden, half disguised by suppositions, misunderstandings, imaginings, partial truths. I know they took her into the hospital to yank out her ovaries or fallopian tubes. I remember it well, because I felt ashamed of the contrast with my own virile health: the splendid immune system that expelled viruses without any feverish scenes, my stupendous stomach busy secreting liters of gastric juices that no feast could withstand. I was proud to be equipped with genitals so receptive to sight and sound, so easy to bring to attention. No hiding inside the lips of any pelvic wound for me, no labyrinth of feminine dampness and complications: the impurity, the vapor, the viscosity. But I did want to kill that quack who I heard say under his breath:

“Female castration.”

The last time my sister hugged me and cried on my shoulder (in a hospital gown so thin it barely shielded me from the chubby touch of her arms), it was because she’d dreamed of a phantom birth. No fetus slid out through her dried-up pipeline — the thing that came from between her legs wasn’t alive, just a lumpy mass of blackened blood.

Ten days after introducing Helen, I went back to Bonanova with a bouquet of dahlias to get Mother’s impression of my American girlfriend. I found her sitting in her little chair; she looked transparent, as if she’d been woven from colorless thread. The expression on her face was soft and serene. For the first time ever, it occurred to me that the mask of her medicine might slip one day. I didn’t get a word out of her about Helen.

“Juan, if you go to the bathroom this time, don’t turn out the light in my grandchildren’s room.”

I was pierced to my marrow by an icy feeling. I’d always taken it for granted that the chemicals slowed her thoughts down; it hadn’t occurred to me that her brain could be damaged.

“Don’t look at me like that, son, don’t be silly. I know I don’t have grandchildren. It’s just that if I leave the light on in the room where I always thought they would sleep, it’s as if they’re keeping me company. Strange.”

“I could still give you grandchildren, Mother.”

“With that girl? With the girl you brought over here? I suppose you still haven’t managed to sort out the numbers your father left.”

“I’m working on it, Mother.”

“You know what I like most about spring, now that I hardly ever leave the house? I like it when they light those paper lanterns at the restaurant on the corner, the ones they hang to give the place some atmosphere. They sell mussels and fries with white and pink sauces. It sounds a little questionable, I know, but the men go in suits and the women wear blouses that are so soft. Beautiful couples. I like to see people having a good time; I don’t hold it against them. How could I, when they’re all heading where I am eventually? Make the most of these years, Joan-Marc, they’ve been well designed.”

She picked up a pill and placed it on her tongue: the pearl on its pillow. She pushed it down her throat with a sip of the linden and mint infusion I’d made her. The liquid in the cup settled back down in yellow and greenish waves.

“What a sad family we are. A suicide, a sick woman, a sterile girl. Who would have thought it when we were starting out, eh? But that’s how things ended up, and that’s fine, that’s fine.”

Who were you talking to, Mother? People who’ve known you for a long time, they do that sometimes: when you’re there in front of them, they see through the man going numb from fidgeting with his napkin, and they start to talk to the boy who made the swing squeal, who kicked along a maroon ball, or the brat they sent away one day to live in another city. And if I’m honest, I didn’t let my mother’s harsh words get to me. What do you think you’d find if you started looking into people who say, filling out their forms, that they’re lawyers, doctors, experts, salespeople, teachers, or nurses? They’re all hiding some rupture, they’re all dragging emotional handicaps along behind them. The time you get is too short to renounce any of the travel, the cars, kisses, and cuisines the world has to offer, so at first glance everyone seems caught up in the present, but just let them talk for twenty minutes or so, and you’ll soon make out the scars beneath the chatter. It’s scary to imagine the extent of the emotional leprosy our self-sufficient high-tech society works so hard to conceal; to think how, beneath that security blanket of photographs attesting to the good time we’re all having, we walk around dissembling, on the lookout, stalking a ration of warmth.

Some of us bear it with more dignity than others. My dear sister was of the sort who bleed when you touch them; she’d rush to scratch your eyes out first so she could protect herself. And this was the woman to whom Helen, her lips damp with saliva and cloudy wine, had decided to reveal her private life, to offer her arm in support and “save her.”

“Your sister is my age, we’d get along well. It would be strange if you didn’t introduce me.”

Ensconced in her living room, my sister had Helen figured out before she ever opened her mouth. She realized Helen had plans to give her a supporting role in a pantomime of incipient sisterly friendship, and she decided to play along. She left Mauro and me in the living room for us to act out at our leisure the scene best suited to us: a deep-sea meeting between an anemone and a sea horse, Mauro waving fibrously while I nodded impassively. My sister led Helen by the arm to admire the spectacle of boiling water in the kitchen, the ideal room for free-flowing confessions. It did not escape her — as if it could escape her — that dissatisfaction was gnawing at Helen’s core.

“I don’t want to keep living in the garret.”

I had prepared Helen for the possibility that my sister would give me a hard time: tell her what a fraud I was, how I was letting our inheritance drain away by the minute, that I was pitifully afraid and ultimately useless. Not to mention how I ignored my mother…

“A family needs a home. Anything else is a bad way to start. Too temporary. Way too temporary.”

But what my sister had actually set about doing in the kitchen (while Mauro trotted out the full range of his interests: bank balances, types of knots, royal lineages…a monody that led me to think about women fighting, and not in sexy little poses — I’m talking all-out rage) was to gently undermine Helen’s confidence, to chip away at our complicity as a couple, to tease out problems.

“The family just wants what’s best for you. It’s up to you to know what that is.”

Helen let herself fall under the sway of a creature so dominated by her brain’s reptilian layers that she secreted malice naturally, the same way her pores opened to let the sweat flow. In certain lights you could confuse her with a different kind of person, I’ll give you that. But it was just an optical effect, a trompe l’oeil. She’d also seem like a genuine world traveler if you let her wear out your eyes on the photographs of her and Mauro Polo in rice paddies, Asian temples, tropical rain forests, Australian savannahs, and places where it snows. Until finally you’d realize that the only thing she got out of all that globe-trotting was a comparative analysis of the locations and services of the Hilton hotel chain. I told Helen, of course I told her. The problem was that I had an urge to be frugal that day, and instead of hailing a taxi to make the trip from Vallvidrera back to the Turret, we took the train. I could feel my words twisting in the air, burning up and crashing to the ground, heavy as potatoes, making no impact on her. Men lose their authority over women when we lecture them on public transportation, that’s just how it is.

It had taken my sister two half-conversations to bewitch Helen and load her up with demands and responsibilities it was then my duty to satisfy. In contrast to the mockery and contempt Helen had received from our “friends,” my sister’s frank manner with her must have seemed like the start of a downright cozy relationship, in which floated the germs of affection. The dough of Helen’s brain had been kneaded with flour supplied by TV dramas and women’s magazines, to the point where my sister barely had to make an effort to convince her that she and Mother had forgiven my bachelor excesses only thanks to Helen’s charm. What could seem more natural? That was precisely the kind of wholesome effect she’d spent her adolescence convinced she would engender the moment she erupted onto the social stage.

“Your sister is right.”

From the tension around her eyes, the self-importance in the way she turned her head, from the repugnant wake those words sown by my sister trailed as they emerged from Helen’s lovely mouth, I realized she was prepared to wage a long-term battle. Every week we spent in the Turret, where we were reasonably happy, began to needle her like an insult. Every day was confirmation that my sister wasn’t talking nonsense, that she hadn’t been wrong when she predicted I’d be unable to satisfy the basic needs of a girl joined to her man out of love.

“Why don’t we go live with your mother? It’s a big apartment, and families are supposed to support each other, right?”

I didn’t have the strength to set straight an error of that magnitude; I didn’t even have the energy to point out the absurd contradiction of demanding that we leave the Turret (which my sister had downgraded to the “garret”) to move into an apartment we’d have to pay for. And then came the sudden, disturbing prospect of my mother living under the same roof as that testosterone accelerator I was married to, with her makeup kit (which weighed as much as Galaxia’s entire collection that you so pretentiously displayed in our living room), and the dregs of Evan Williams that nestled in unexpected crannies (that drink was my latest discovery, and it got our systems purring like motorcycles). The trick of suggesting we live with Mother transformed the repugnant prospect of leaving the Turret, with its view over roofs and terraces stretching toward the shining sliver of sea, into a reasonable option. I stopped giving her the runaround, and even while I was slogging through a storm of financial disasters (that pair of hucksters tasked with getting the family business “afloat” again must have been about to advise me to invest in cheeses, an idea that came from the Passgard people), I got down to apartment hunting. I visited over twenty real estate agents, where I learned that the children of the old working class were swallowing seventy-year mortgages, with interest rates subject to the ups and downs of various gloomy indices; they were even signing off on eviction clauses. Ah, you marvelous middle class, your shining greed, luxury cars and second homes, Far Eastern vacations paid for in installments: wonderful sons of sidereal Spain, that winter I loved you as never before. The apartments on offer looked like they’d survived a bombing in Kosovo. Broken stoves, cisterns that threatened to crack your skull open, paneled hallways. None of the places I could afford were up to Helen’s standards (and when I say “none,” I’m talking about two months of traversing the Eixample and Sarrià and the disinfected parts of Gràcia like a herd of elephants after water). Those standards, of course, were informed by interior design magazines published for citizens who pay their taxes in countries swimming in oil — magazines my sister began sending her so they could go over them together in detail, sitting at the Mauri café.

“It doesn’t have enough light.”

“I won’t live on a mezzanine floor.”

“It smells. Barcelona smells damp.”

“The windows face a wall.”

“The ceiling is crumbling.”

“You won’t want me walking up stairs when I’m pregnant, will you?”

“I can’t live in this neighborhood.”

“The kitchen is old.”

“The bathroom needs redesigning.”

“We couldn’t have friends over with this living room.”

It had already been hard for me, as a teenager, when I’d discovered that people don’t get to choose where they cook, sleep, and cheat, that houses aren’t just handed over for free, and questions of space and overcrowding, light-drenched salons or narrow living rooms weren’t just matters of taste. So when the next Passgard report came, I had to lean against the wall and watch a few wagons loaded down with coal for the funeral pyre go by: we were left with the Bonanova apartment, the Turret, some questionable investments, and the ace of cheese (still up our sleeve). I had the miserable thought that people making their way up from the bottom, without family networks or contacts, have even less; that cheered me up for about half a minute. I got so nervous that a rash of small pimples broke out over my hands, and the hair on my chest and pubic area turned salt-and-pepper on the left side (the side of arterial problems). I think it was my disfigured appearance that finally moved Helen; she’d rather live in a small apartment (only not that small!) than let herself be seen with a prematurely aged geezer.

“I never said we had to move now. We can wait. You get so hysterical over money.”

And I was so candid, so disrespectful toward my own intelligence, that I sent a copy of the Passgard report to my sister. Enough of acting like children, I was going to convince her we had to “join forces,” “pull together”…that kind of thing.

My sister asked me for a meeting, and she showed up with a stuffed shirt in tow, sporting the obligatory pink tie and a hairdo that was a living, breathing example of the “law of excluded middle.” He put a briefcase smelling of new leather on the table, next to the Passgard report with underlining in red, and a calculator. That clown, who’d put on a brand-new jacket just to intimidate me, was the hit man my sister had recruited to stick a burning iron rod up my ass.

“We have to sell the garret.”

Her plan was to sacrifice my house to fix a problem that was bad news for both of us. She was demanding I become one of the huddled masses who have to use the first euros they earn every month to pay for a place to live. If we didn’t stem the flow of toxic capital by turning my beautiful home into healthy euros, it wouldn’t be long before the Bonanova apartment was threatened, and Mother’s security with it. I took a sip of coffee, and I guess I must have ad-libbed some arguments.

“You should have learned to keep your mouth shut by now. The least you can do is not interrupt when someone serious is talking,” she said.

She sat there looking at me cruelly, defying me. We had shared our childhood; I just couldn’t understand it. She’d stayed up all night practicing, exposing her fleshy insecurities before the mirror. My little sister was expecting me to throw my coffee in her face, to huff and puff, to fly off the handle. But instead she got the gaze of a compassionate older brother, the gentle indulgence that made her burn with rage. I didn’t do it just to make her feel some of the discomfort I felt; over all these years, my dealings with my sister have provided the only glimmer of saintliness I’ve been able to display. I would even have donated a good portion of an organ if its fibers and cells and molecules could resuscitate the dried-up regions of her belly.

I was willing to play dumb in order to maintain our relationship, though I wouldn’t go so far as to believe that plan of hers was born of any sisterly desire to lighten my load: so I wouldn’t feel guilty, because she was tired of watching me suffer, for my own good. But I was convinced the Passgard report had scared her. It was her facial expressions, the bitter smell she gave off sitting opposite me. It’s true, money doesn’t smell, but the fear of being short of it reeks — the fear that the net beneath your feet will break, the fear of ending up in one of those jobs that slowly suffocates your dignity. Mauro’s protection was provisional; he could always get tired of her, he could kick her out. She was afraid of having to take care of Mother, of being trapped in her marriage to Popo, of having to rely on his charity.

“It would be best for everyone if you were out in a week.”

And she left me with a brochure for some new apartments, seventy square meters, in L’Hospitalet.

“You’d be seven stops from the middle of town, and electricity and water are much cheaper there. And the mortgage is very low.”

The apartment I found, the apartment I finagled without paying a deposit, was on an uncomfortable hill below Diagonal; it had a bedroom with no balcony into which wafted the emanations from a repair shop, a living room that seemed fairly large until Helen decorated it with two four-seater sofas, wall shelves, and a table on which we could have sacrificed a buffalo. We bought flowers, pots, and a TV. I brought Dad’s little Miró, whose blotches, in my worst moments, seemed to conspire mockingly. The utility room, the kitchen, and our bedroom looked onto a narrow courtyard that pigeons had singled out as a depository for their filth. The bathroom (with a shower stall) and the dining room were flooded with sunlight at noon; I liked the effect of the light slowly turning the windowsills golden, illuminating the air as if igniting the space between atoms. We bought three electric heaters and rotated them, so there was always one cold room; the radiators gave Helen headaches. And that was the apartment that guzzled my salary, that forced me to fall back on my savings, that left us without a vacation; the apartment that rationed our dinners and nights out, that obliged me to calculate the cost of drinks. The apartment that tied our hands, and that still wasn’t good enough for Helen. In fact, she managed pretty well to imply (or remind me) a couple of times a week that the place was a dump.

Back in the Turret, Helen’s reproaches had been so all over the place that we rarely clashed in earnest; it was just a way of relating to me, of letting out the currents of mean-spirited ideas before they festered. I listened to them, but it wasn’t hard to convince myself she was directing them to someone else.

“If the electricity keeps going off you should talk to the landlord or the council. That’s what a real man would do.”

“The way you joke about religion isn’t funny at all. I’m a believer, you know. I don’t go to church because I don’t have time, but I intend to invest in it later. It’s a plan for the second half of my life, if you don’t strangle me first. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt very close to Jesus.”

“A girl’s got to really excite men so she doesn’t end up married to a fag. They can simulate the lewd way of looking, they learn it as teenagers from their single friends. Since they’re all so depraved, they can perform acceptably at first. The real drama comes later. So I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”

“You’re just a little boy, John. You don’t know what to do with a woman who loves you with all her soul.”

I should have replied that I wasn’t even sure I believed in the soul. I’d read in a popular science magazine that the mind was a function of the brain, a kind of talkative and obsessive phantom, but those scientists never really convinced me. How do you prove that something doesn’t exist? And how do you prove something you’ve never even seen? I wouldn’t say I’m fundamentally a believer in some invisible existence, but scientists will have to come up with a lot of explanations — and good ones — to deny that there is something beyond the flesh, the spinal vertebrae, the network of veins. I discovered all this during the wake, when I was alone with my father’s rigid body, his skin yellow under the makeup. It was Dad, all that was left of him, but it was missing the force that had stirred his muscles, the soft electricity that lit his expressions, the swell of his thoughts, his voice. Scientists have their fabulous tools for seeing ever further and deeper, but they’re badly focused. For all the chemical power these balls of gray matter have, it still seems wrong to yank the soul out of the heart only to put a mind in the brain; I could identify my father or Helen easily by that stubborn pump. While Helen chopped vegetables, watched TV, tried on clothes, or spread lotion over her skin, her eyes and the play of her facial muscles were always palpitating with rage, desire, fear — all reflecting what was going on in the viscus in her chest.

“You’re too intellectual.”

But what began to brew in our new apartment was something more disturbing than Helen’s inclination to channel her baser emotions my way. Our arguments had a personal tinge now. My sister, camouflaged as doting sister-in-law, started to take Helen out. And what a pair they must have been: my little sister’s perfumed rotundity beside Helen dressed in white, Helen in green, Helen in jeans, Helen in sandals, Helen dressed in a tunic and burka, it didn’t matter. How the contrast must have pained my sister. And, honestly, our parents’ DNA had demonstrated the vast range of its possible combinations when from the same ingredients it formed a son with the makings of an athlete and the mythical Fiera Corrupia beast in female form. In a city like Barcelona, with so much feminine beauty on display, every trip into town must have needled my sister terribly. And when Mauro took her shopping down Passeig de Gràcia, it must have been like dousing her hands in acid. I’m not saying that Hermès and company didn’t have their soothing effect, but the problem is that people’s clothes always come off in the end. Genetic destiny had been a bitch to my sister. She should have moved someplace where the human temperature was more lukewarm, to take the edge off her envy. Antwerp, maybe. They make jewelry there, it rains every day, and the people are so ugly I had to go into a shop and buy a magazine just to rest my eyes on a pleasant face.

And don’t think you got away unscathed. When your time came, that tongue of hers had poison for you as well.

“You do everything backward, Juan. You don’t even realize how predictable you are. Only you would think to marry the wild and sensual one first, then divorce her to set up house with a tame, snooty woman who doesn’t fool me — if she spends all her time reading, it’s only to make up for her nonexistent social life. And don’t give me that about how she’s a writer, that’s just bullshit to make herself seem more interesting. Writers write, and if that girl, at her age, was destined for literature, she’d have published something by now. A couple of stories at the very least.”

It was no good reminding her I hadn’t left Helen for you — my sister had no interest in chronological precision. The type who won’t let any scrupulous adherence to facts get in the way of a moral tongue-lashing.

The simplest thing, and don’t think I didn’t consider it for years, was to conclude that her contempt for you, for Helen, for the girls in between en route to our marriage, was not only because of her cabbage face, but was also fed by an incestuous envy: she was secretly in love with me. These days I’m fairly certain that she was singing your praises in a roundabout way; I think you got her all horny, and she was really a Hummer-sized carpet muncher. Because just tell me how a woman who likes men could tie herself down to one like Popovych.

Anyway, my sister took Helen on the Grand Tour of things we couldn’t afford, and she added the bitter aftertaste of “things you can’t afford as long as you’re with him” and the cynical finish of “a woman like you”: they went to Biosca & Botey, to the Jaguar dealership on Roger de Llúria (neither of them could drive). They licked their lips in front of the window displays on Passeig de Gràcia, and then she took Helen to Cartier. If she didn’t reserve a table at the underwater restaurant in the Red Sea, it’s just because it hadn’t opened yet. And don’t think I only see my sister’s mean side — I’m almost proud of her for managing to design such a fantastic panorama, one in which Helen had more reasons to be ashamed of marrying me than my sister had for marrying Mauro. If I didn’t give her a hug there and then, if I didn’t jump up to applaud her, it was because my head wasn’t clear. I’d been diagnosed with a terrible social disease: working. Not decoratively, or as an exotic way of finding myself, but as a necessity if we were to keep our bodily gears turning. I was so tense I almost didn’t notice the new little battery of complaints that Helen started lobbing reproachfully from her sofa, legs crossed: she told me I had to try my best to get her into precisely what I was desperate to get away from.

“If I want to be a liberated woman, I need a job. And I am a liberated woman.”

The problem was not so much that Helen confused a certain style in bed with a true breadth of thought; it was not that the person encouraging her longing to labor had never done a day’s work in her life. The real issue was that in order to find her a job, we were going to have to get past our “lifestyle,” which was incompatible with any form of employment. Incompatible, even, with the most permissive idea of healthy behavior.

Of course we were young (young — oh, truly young), with splendid livers and the kidneys of racehorses, and every night I dragged her out to drink. We whiled away hours in lounges and pubs, in the whisky bars that had come into fashion. We breathed it all in, fascinated by the array of nocturnal possibilities, the soft air of winter nights, walking a grid of streets where even the blind can’t get lost, among the thousands of Barcelonans either passing through or living there with whom unexpected friendships crystallize on every night out, ready to dissolve like sugar in the liquid morning. We let ourselves be carried along on the same tide of parties and gossip and expensive drinks and attractive and stupid people that had swallowed up and sucked the bones of so many careers before us: students from the provinces, naive madrileños, Erasmus students who arrive with a moderately condescending idea about the superiority of northern ways and end up won over by the charms of the Barcelona night.

As you know, alcohol has never affected me. I know how to pace myself, when to take a break; I don’t mix, and I never drink tequila or rotgut. Too bad Helen belonged to that group who refuse to learn the basic rules of drinking. Once she reached the point where alcohol starts “lubricating socially,” Helen would get drowsy. Then I could take her home and put her to bed, with no responsibility beyond breathing until late the next morning.

My days were simple: at eleven thirty I entered the office trailing cologne, because I hadn’t yet learned that the vile stuff is made by mixing animal excrement and offal. If there were still traces of alcohol splashing around in my temples like those crazy seals that never tire of jumping for their sardine, I rode it out drinking coffee and water. My colleagues supplied me with reports, and when I got tired of leafing through folders I counted people through the window, with its view of the traffic on Via Augusta. I liked the pastry shop, where I watched spoiled grandchildren come and go, nibbling at puff pastries. And so my mornings passed; going off the rails is stressful, but it doesn’t require much concentration.

I laid out a few safe zones: on Tuesdays and Thursdays we barely drank, we’d stay in and watch something Helen had rented at the video store, we’d eat dinner at home, high-calorie dishes of Tex-Mex inspiration — any kind of chili mixed with beef, with pork, covered in fronds of cheddar cheese. We fought for the good spot on the sofa (the armrest was loose on the left side), over who spooned whom, over the remote control (she got nervous in scenes where the sound track heralded a scare), she tickled me and I couldn’t get her off me the way I can you: you may be five foot seven but you’ve always been manageable. I don’t know if Helen topped five foot three, but with those thighs so abundant in flesh, and those scholarship athlete’s powerful arms, it was a struggle for me. It wasn’t unusual for both of us to end up on the floor in configurations that seemed pretty erotic to me but only made her laugh — a shuddering of the damp opening encircled by her lips — and from which she would emerge looking at me disconcertedly, drenched in a liquid gratitude, as if that kind of spontaneous happiness wasn’t right there in the script she’d brought with her all the way from Montana.

I admit it was a pretty bad sign when Helen spent the morning checking the clock out of the corner of her eye, urging it to strike the universally agreed hour when it’s acceptable to start drinking. But I can assure you that was better than when she started warming up her gullet early in the morning and spent the whole day submerged in a bucket of alcohol; I’d come home at noon and find her with half-closed eyes, her upper lip sweating. I started to feel embarrassed for her. For months she lied to me, her tongue red from tannins and swollen like a plum. Catching others telling lies tends to give you a certain fleeting power over the relationship, so I suppose we entered a new phase when she stopped bothering to hide it when she was drunk. She would wait for me with goose bumps, in bed or on the sofa, and if I managed to make a noise horrible enough to penetrate the sensitive roots of her brain, Helen would turn with a mechanical movement that spoke very eloquently of her inability to stand up, and pierce me with her wooden gaze. It’s terrible when women start to drink in earnest, much worse than when men get sloshed. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is.

I guess a grown-up husband would have taken the bull by the horns. Confronting problems head-on didn’t come easily to me, though; you can’t be good at everything. I couldn’t even manage to ease up on our nighttime rhythm. I was very tense, and those excursions were my main distraction, my only source of daily gratification. I couldn’t resist the sight of her buttocks swaying drunkenly, and I wasn’t willing to go from being a beneficiary to a casualty just because no one had ever taught Helen to drink like a civilized person.

So, why lie to you? I went on taking her to parties, dunking her in basins of cheap alcoholic distraction that slowly gained ground on the dry areas of our life together. Plus, what do you think Helen would have to offer if you took away her masculine impulse to have a good time — to devour the dance floor and the bar, to impulsively challenge our occasional, itinerant friends, unforgettable as archetypes, to participate in burping contests, which I could never take part in without a shudder? What drove me crazy about Helen was her aggressive femininity, the fact that she kept her fragility well hidden in a corner of our apartment, in the box where she kept her family mementos. I didn’t want a spoiled little girl. What I wanted was a sidekick for my nocturnal escapades, someone to set my blood on fire every day. If Helen had turned into a teetotaller, if I’d felt she wanted to start behaving like a lady, if she’d narrowed her ambitious and defiant eyes with the insipid demand that I take care of her, I wouldn’t have known what to do. We would’ve really been in trouble then.

Unfortunately, the domestic life that best suited me made finding Helen a job somewhat more complicated, you might say. Of course, if you think something is impossible, you’ll see an opportunity peek its head out from the least promising quarter. The Popovychs invited us over for what would be a jam-packed get-together, brimming with work opportunities, with no need for us to sweat for it. Since the fiasco that put an end to our attempt at integrating into Barcelona’s social life, our policy outside our apartment was based on avoiding any gatherings or closed social circles — all those collective expectations.

“Don’t be silly, Juan, it’s going to be a stupendous party — it’s my house! Also, it’ll be full of people who can rustle up a job by snapping their fingers. If Helen’s on her toes, or even just stays quiet, she’ll get that job she wants so much. If you can get her to save some money, you can go on vacation again. I’m sick of watching you sulk. Listen to me, I’m your sister. Or don’t you want her to work?”

And so we went up to Vallvidrera, me in a three-piece suit and Helen in a blue dress that showed the skin of her shoulders and the contours of her blunt allure. Helen herself, though, was down on her appearance that day: the diameter of her ankles, her thick wrists, the almost-chestnut down covering her arms. They were all barriers between her as she was and a more delicate slimness, her goal that night as she tried on dresses before the mirror. It’s funny to discover the doubts and misgivings in people who please us entirely, not to mention how little we can do for them when they’re wrestling with the spectral image of what they aspire to and will never achieve.

I managed not to say a single venomous word about the Corinthian columns my sister had installed in the dining room. I managed not to raise an eyebrow when she revealed that the theme of the party was the Mediterranean; and I transformed my annoyance into indifference when Popovych showed me the scale models of the Pinta, the Niña, and that other ship that he’d stuffed into a glass bottle. Still, the party’s real stars were neither the sea nor any famous ships, but the shipowners who were fast becoming the season’s sensation after one of them traded his discreetly built wealth for the acting directorship of some mid-sized city’s football team — Zaragoza or Pamplona, who knows. His colleagues weren’t going to be left out, they wanted their share of the high life, too, and they went to the experts with their brimming pockets and all the refinement of a quadruped fattened up in a herd. But don’t get me wrong, I like blazers, and I have almost nothing against golf pants.

In any case, those people were no more boring or unimaginative than the property developers who were about to burst onto the scene. All of them investors on legs for Mauro and his jewels. Their wives weren’t to be missed either, and my sister was a sight to see — she’d poured herself into some ivory trousers tailored perfectly to her sizable ass. I realized she was treating Helen like an equal and not a rival, and not saying a word against me. So I relaxed, loosened the knot of my tie, and poured myself several glasses of Mauro’s extraordinary whisky that lights up your pituitary and conjures a spicy foretaste of a heaven more enjoyable than the Christian one.

As we were leaving, my sister gave Helen a kiss on the cheek and announced into her ear that she would call her to talk about the offer that was being cooked up between Mauro and a shipowner whose home for tax purposes was in Castellón, a city no one has been able to convince me actually exists, in spite of the dot right there on the map. The evening had been a success. I said good-bye to Mauro with a private joke. I was a bit tipsy and I was moved by the sight of a serene Helen wiggling her toes — which barely fit into the narrow shoes she’d forced on them — on the taxi floor. I forgave her for being fairly distracted in bed, for starting to laugh when I tried to get her going by kissing her between the thighs, for thinking it so sexy that night to move her toes over my face (I will die without ever finding an erotic function for what you women have below your knees). She just wasn’t going to get turned on, some nights are like that: hormonal rebalancing, sudden changes in emotional temperature, too much happiness to give yourself over to the struggle of bodies. I let it go. My only consolation was seeing her get up and walk around the living room in the maroon bra and panties she’d agreed to wear for me, though still in the antic jester mode that made all my intentions wilt. She opened both doors of the wardrobe and began to evaluate her clothes, making lists out loud of the accessories she would have to buy. She ran out and came back with thread between her teeth to secure the buttons on a blouse she never wore because (according to her) she wore it too much, and carrying Dad’s old atlas, its spine crossed with strips of tape that inspired sorrow and disgust and tenderness, to study the outline of the east coast, because she wanted to arrive on her first day of work well dressed and smoothly pronouncing the treacherous z’s that her big mouth was unable to wrap itself around. I was lying on the bed with my shirt open, and I watched her while my blood ebbed out of the organ of our intimacy and made its way into my veins to be redistributed to more cerebral zones, which the higher functions of affection and attachment and sympathy inhabit. And then I thought how well it suited her to win — we can all do with a bit of good luck.

That week I didn’t even have to replace any bottles of booze. It was hard to imagine how her personality was going to square with a job, but as I sank my hands into hot water to wash the dishes, I told myself that people can be very intelligent when they need to be. We humans are capable of change when faced with a new environment, and anyway it wasn’t up to me to solve this one.

“Amador wants to start making money from his old ships. We suggested he throw parties on deck, at sunset. He’s going to need girls to serve the drinks, and to spice things up. He’ll be inviting a lot of single men. Also, and you won’t believe your luck here, Amador has invited me and Mauro to the opening, so you won’t even feel lonely.”

She didn’t break anything, she didn’t shout, she merely hung up the phone, explained the situation matter-of-factly in English, and went into the bathroom. I heard the crunch of the lock. She didn’t even ask me to defend her, or to sort the situation out.

“I don’t ever want to see her again.”

And when I did pick up the phone to confront my sister, ready to make her choke on her arrogance and meanness, it was with a sense of burning shame at how slow I’d been. I was ashamed by the stinginess of my first reaction when Helen told me the news: I’d been happy about the extra income.

“You listen to me, Joan-Marc, you married a sorry excuse for a human, so don’t blame me. Dad went to great pains to teach us how to behave with people who go to shopping malls. You tell me how I’m supposed to deal with a creature who is 70 percent alcohol, and the rest a mishmash of lust, vulgarity, and resentment. Anyway, a job is a job.”

Helen stood firm. We cut my sister out of our lives, but in Helen’s head the same tune was still playing:

“What I need is a job.”

“Find a job.”

“You have to find me a job.”

She wheeled out her defeated voice, and with her feet and arms and her chest tensed, she reminded me of a storm cloud gathering electricity. It was odd: Helen was a woman who would leave things in a half-done mess just to go out and drink with me, who would rather rob a costume-jewelry stall at the flea market than unload laundry from the machine, who always forgot to replace the toilet paper and reduced the kitchen sponge to a pulp before she’d buy a new one, a woman who’d seemingly be able to adapt to life in a Tuareg encampment; but her demands came nonstop. Helen didn’t go out to hunt the buffalo for dinner; she demanded I do it, as if when she’d married me I’d taken charge of maintaining her. She kept her unrelenting mental torments to herself: it was as if she’d tied her body to an iron bar to keep herself tensed and alert in uncomfortable positions, poised on tiptoe.

And what job was I going to get for her? What could I find for a dropout from a university whose degrees almost certainly weren’t compatible with European humanism? The only money she’d ever earned was her scholarship check for being a promising long jumper, and the fact that jumping earns precious little in the job market was not something I could fix. Helen didn’t want to serve drinks, she refused to babysit, she felt faint at the very thought of improving her Spanish or learning Office for Windows; she wouldn’t even consider trying her luck as a tour guide. Where did the pulse of her aspirations beat? And based on what secret talent? What ability had I overlooked? In Helen’s world (the world of her diaries, her private conversations) all princesses are blonde and born in the UNITED STATES (the nitwit wrote both words in capital letters). And they were all named Helen! When you consider that, it makes sense that at the first job she got in Montana after a hip injury (which I later learned was really her pregnancy with Jackson) she managed to arrive three minutes late every day until they had the nerve to kick her out. What can I say — I understand her boss. The only qualification expected of a cashier at a baby-clothes shop is that she respect the set of basic social courtesies that include hygiene and punctuality. All because neither the first day nor the second did they ask her why she was late. Helen was fighting back against indifference. With her defiance, she was trying to make someone show an interest in her thoughts, her feelings, in the contours of her inner landscape. And there’s the mistake that causes so many people to slide into bitterness: the brain buys cheap materials and uses them to build its dreams. In contrast, let’s admire the foundations of my stupendous emotional equilibrium: I know what I’m worth, and I tailor my objectives to the capital at my disposal. Of course, you used to call this source of emotional solidity my “lack of ambition.” You used to hold it against me!

Helen had gotten used to just sitting there looking sour. That had been her winning strategy when she’d wanted to stay and live with me, when she’d wanted to change cities, and later when she’d wanted a bigger apartment. And since she combined a fantastical imagination with an exhaustive lack of knowledge about the concrete steps necessary to achieve something, she convinced herself that if a job didn’t “turn up,” it was all my fault. Because I wasn’t giving it the requisite attention, because to me the emptiness eating away at her was just one more passing complication — women’s problems — and we only had to sweep it under the sofa and wait for the day a servant would vacuum it up. Only we didn’t have any servants. And since she wasn’t about to give in and I was incapable of resolving the issue, we started to fight in earnest, engaging our entire nervous systems.

Helen had certainly learned from my sister. She tried to combine the precise proportions of arrogance and ignorance to stay on top in the argument. She took advantage of my strategic pauses to remind me I’d been incapable of rebuilding Dad’s business, or of starting something on my own initiative. She had the gall to accuse me of being unenlightened, just because she’d started taking refuge in the fashionable women’s pastimes that were booming then: patchwork quilting and Swedish gymnastics. Just because she went to a guru who, in exchange for some money (of mine), attached names of mystical seasons to her absurd behaviors. None of that got her anywhere with me — Helen didn’t have a rotten uterus, and I didn’t feel at all sorry for her. In fact, I found it satisfying to put her down till she couldn’t take it anymore and that cold mask of indifference thawed into stickier features.

Whenever I got the better of her, Helen would run away and hole up in our bedroom to pump her antistress balls or contort herself into a Pilates position. She’d stay quiet while my rage coagulated into streams of verbal garbage. I let her have the starring role: I was just a furious chatterbox while she, twisted up fakir-style, believed she was connecting to a pre-linguistic knowledge. But the only thing I got out of it was the handful of phrases she used to convey unfavorable and precise views on my value as a husband. I would have liked to tell her she was facing a Sisyphean struggle in trying to achieve an inner balance, because it was truly frightening to read the things she wrote on little slips of paper in her drunkard’s handwriting, minutes before or after we got into a fight:

An action committed in anger is an action doomed to failure.

Nothing is so serious it can’t be said with a smile.

Let your desires go.

I am an injured woman!

Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.

In the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world.

I don’t know what things are like in the Himalayas, but among us Westerners, greedy for cars, houses, restaurants (which, incidentally, Helen was not willing to give up), and travel, that kind of harmony, that pluperfect serenity, is unattainable. Helen would paint a dot on her forehead and repeat in a fluty voice: “There is no greater relief than to start becoming what one is,” or “A philosopher who couldn’t walk because he stepped on his beard, cut off his feet.” But it was the very same Helen who spent the week overusing a system of dirty looks to urge me on to a bigger apartment, far-flung vacations, a more glamorous job.

“You don’t have a suitable life-vision, John.”

What I understood quite clearly now was that Helen had escaped from her family as if from a pool of boiling water, only to shack up in a series of bad relationships. Also that once we find ourselves wrapped in the delights of a responsible life, most of us are stunned to see the loathsome ways our friends have matured. If things go well for us, by the time we turn forty we’ve morphed into suspicious, deceitful, irascible, and lazy creatures, crazy to photograph ourselves, broadcast ourselves. And if things go badly, there’s no need to add the burden of a perfect serenity we’ll never come close to achieving. I would have rather had Helen accept that the fetid breath our parents passed on to us, and all the other debilitating things that make up our lives and backgrounds, are no reason to be bitter. If you take it with a little spice, you can make it all worthwhile. Why else do people mostly go out kicking and screaming when they get old? I can understand if women get a little hippy-dippy once their hips stop bringing action into the bedroom (a lot have trouble developing intellectual pursuits, and they have those estrogen problems, the hot flashes and dry vaginas). But Helen was too young to give up on the good stuff in life.

If things were so bad, why did I stay with her? Was it just the sex? What a low suggestion, unbecoming to your intellect. I can refute it in half a minute. It’s not my fault that retinal cells can assess the possibilities of a woman’s body in two seconds flat. It’s not my fault my eye is perfectly adapted to calculate erotic maturity. I’ll tell you something, it doesn’t matter how smart you women think you are, how intelligent, cultured, sensitive, or pretty you are — most of you have no idea when it comes to the effect your fellow females provoke in men you desire. You’re blinded by a fog that not even the most jealous man would succumb to.

Which doesn’t change the fact that the bond of sex was still alive and well between Helen and me. You’d have to be a man to understand how hard it is to give up a woman who thinks like a man in the sack, who doesn’t show the slightest hesitation about starting the day with a session that renews your nerves, that leaves your spirit with the unbeatable feeling that you are putting something truly unrepeatable between life and goddamn death. As if seeing Helen every day, caught up in one of her trivial schemes, weren’t incentive enough to tie myself to the mast of a sinking ship. What Helen and I had wasn’t about masks and feathers; the kind of understanding grew between us that demands something more than complicity of the flesh: an entire brain ignited in passion. And those daily free-for-alls conspired to reshape the relationship; it makes life worth living, the feeling of devouring the girl whose neck you were ready to break half an hour earlier. They weren’t bad times: when the tenderness is still there, it takes a very deft touch to sodomize the woman of your dreams.

Helen made me feel alive, and without feeling alive I wouldn’t know how to live. You spent long enough with me (and those were my best years) to learn that shades of gray are not my strong suit. Or don’t you remember how you used to defend me, extolling the way I filled your days with light? How sad is a woman’s offended dignity when the flesh is not your own, when the sensual one is someone else. What hypocrites you all are — if I remember rightly, you didn’t exactly marry a mummy either, or some mama’s boy hard at work on your orgasm. You never complained when it was our sheets I was twisting up, and you knew perfectly well how to turn all that energy to your advantage.

What’s more, and to put an end to this lamentable dialogue once and for all, it wasn’t just me. Ask anyone: sex was the key, sex was enough, sex was the thing. How simple life must have seemed back when we were convinced that all we had to do was satisfy our erotic urges and the hard edges of the world would soften into a serene landscape. I know that era existed, and it must have been something worth living through. Our bodies came of age at a time when sexual initiation came easy. Forget the myth of the seventies — it was during the boom of second homes, with parents who left us alone to study on the weekends, when the true sexual revolution began. Sure, it could take a few months to find the right companion, but then some daring little chubster would appear, a timidly precocious girl, a wild child, a sensualist; you could take them by the hand and leap into the void, calming the spasms of excitement as best you could. You’d feel cold, afraid, but it was worth it, because what no one can save you from is the terror, the frustration, and the servility that hound you if you don’t lose your cherry on time. Believe it or not, it came as a shock for me too that sex was nothing like a cottony floating, that we’d hit bone against bone and plow on while breathing in that mixture of high and low aromas; in sum, that the cut separating pleasure from pain isn’t a clean one. It took me a while to get used to the warmth of a woman’s sex. The last thing you’d expect was that beneath the pubic fuzz that viscous texture would give off such a soft aroma. The first girls I was with didn’t know how to position themselves, or what to do with their hands, or how to move. I never know why I talk as if there were hundreds, and not the three or four little bodies I came to feel the touch, the pull with. Even in our best moments, I knew I could cast them off like changing a shirt, although it was good to be enjoying an almost-mature living specimen for a few hours, making the most of the cosmic miracle — absurd, if you think about it — that girls even like boys’ dry bodies.

I hadn’t even known what was in store for me — the things life hides are so surprising. Plus, I know I was lucky: I had cool rooms, good people, and wide beds. Did I ever tell you about poor Porras? He misjudged the distance between his head and the wall, and when he was already inside his girl he banged his head with every thrust; but the setup was so impossibly delicate he preferred a cracked skull to pulling out and risking never getting back in again. Looking back, I think I behaved well with those girls during those opening skirmishes — more tactical than pleasurable — though in the aloof way of a kid who hasn’t yet turned eighteen and is cutting himself the largest possible slice of life.

Helen was the girl I wanted, the one I opened wide and fucked during our bodies’ most glorious hours, while our two minds spun wildly inside their skulls. But it was also the first time I’d been penned in with another body I had such easy access to, and we only had to be left alone in a locked room for her smitten little motor to make her strip. We had to change the code of signs and symbols for when we could and couldn’t, when she was teasing me, when it was important I prevail and when it was better to let her win, when it was preferable to take a shortcut to a placid ending, when better to cross some arbitrary boundary, when it was nonnegotiable for Helen that we stop there, on the edge, if you like, not one step further. Because there are no rules, there never were, how would anyone enforce them when you’re talking about two people alone together? Do you think Dad was watching over us, that Daddy Rupert could see us, that God sent angels to record the things that fleshly beings do to one another? Those threats have never kept teenagers from wanking in bathrooms, and they certainly wouldn’t quiet the underground whisper of copulation that hums beneath society’s chorus. We were too young, too chock-full of energy, of healthy blood and enviable lymphatic systems you could glimpse in the tissues of our armpits, our thighs, necks, and the knee pits that drained our toxins. Never more than during that year and a half did I believe that the only thing I needed was to watch her walk around with wet hair and all those grueling problems that have been so hard on me would melt away, and the indifferent universe would whisper to me that I was doing things right, really right. And I would feel like — I’d really be — a winner. The Madrid hotels, the Turret, that apartment stuffed with elephantine furniture, they all showed me sex’s bracing energy, its true, essential depths that can’t be cheapened, and it seemed the pinnacle of everything a guy like me could ever achieve. The ideas that burned in that young mind of mine were so different from today’s: it’s outrageous to have been there, to have even lived through those teeming hours, one by one.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I couldn’t have just torn myself away from Helen and found another, similar woman. It was as if a cord of intangible flesh had grown between us and was keeping us tied together. So I even followed her to the bathroom, peeking in when she thought she was safe from my gaze, and I watched as she leaned her backside against the sink; sometimes there were tears and she let them run down her cheek, then she’d ask me to make her a bowl of yogurt and cereal and fruit. I’d slice apples with the gentlest version of the virile strength I used to shift and pinch her on the defenseless sheets in the Barcelona light. In the background I’d hear the water heater and the shower and I’d smile like an idiot, anticipating Helen’s damp footprints as she tramped around the living room (they started to evaporate at the outline of her heel), in search of a towel to match the one she had tied up in a turban. And I know you won’t like this detail, but even after rinsing them, the furrows in my fingers retained Helen’s smells, like the ghost of an orgasm, a subtle olfactory bond. I never tired of seeing Helen’s full breasts through the crook of her arm when she sat down to tear skin off her just-washed toes. The matter that flayed like layers of chipped paint during our arguments came from other parts of our life. I always felt that we were safe from wear and tear in our bed, which was like a well containing the waters of that altered state.

So while Helen grew desperate, I had to be brave and turn down various offers of work on her behalf. Sure, she hadn’t finished her degree, but she could speak English and German, and no one had to convince me of her good looks. The offers came from some of Dad’s friends, and classmates from ESADE who’d done better than me. I suppose they just wanted to do me a favor, but I didn’t like their condescending tone, and the salaries they offered Helen were too high. The money would have come in handy, but a husband’s first responsibility should be to find and protect his wife’s vulnerable side; economic independence would have exposed Helen to the dog-eat-dog world out there, and she wasn’t ready for that. Plus, my situation was temporary: the plan for the cheese business was giving off a splendid aroma then. There was no way it could fail, I was paying Passgard too much money. The funds would start to flow again through the magic channel of Dad’s inheritance. We were sowing the seeds of profits, the small capital gains were gestating, growing organs in the shadows. Helen didn’t need to dress up and expose herself to the responsibilities of the working world. It just wasn’t her style.

I did my very best to hide what I was doing, and I wasn’t bad at it. There was one time, though, when she almost discovered that the temp agencies’ most-ignored CV led a triumphant double life in family businesses looking to expand to Bonn or fabulous Hamburg. It was one afternoon when she came home unexpectedly because she’d forgotten her hand lotion. I was at the other end of the apartment, gargling with the same mouthwash that had provided a minty disguise for the putrid vapors my father’s bad digestion gave off. I heard the door open and Helen’s voice, wrapped in a greeting, drove an image into my head: the open letter (its red envelope) where that jackass Recassens officially reminded me of his father’s keen interest in interviewing my girl. I rushed out and startled her; she was in the same tight green dress she’d worn the day we left Madrid, the day we’d uprooted ourselves from the life we never got to know there. The fabric wasn’t as snug around her thighs, she was thinner now, and when she saw my joyful race down the hallway, she smiled at me as the letter fell from her fingers: thin cheeks, thick lips.

“My hand lotion. Dry day.”

She went into the kitchen, and I heard the liquor as it splashed into the glass — that magic touch. I folded the letter and stuffed it in the pocket of my robe; you could say I hid it. She went into the bathroom and I took the opportunity to tear it to pieces; then, when Helen left again, her stomach warm from the liquor, I held the flame of a lighter to them. I called Recassens that very afternoon to thank him for the kind gesture. And heard myself say for the first time the mantra I would repeat for weeks, whether it was relevant or not:

“Helen is very happy with her new job. I don’t want to boast, but you wouldn’t believe what these shipowners pay.”

I know if I’d read her the whole letter she would have scratched my eyes out, though she would have struggled with Recassens’s Catalan. But before she left, she kissed me joylessly on the mouth, and she didn’t take the hand lotion with her. It stayed on the counter, untouched.

What’s a job, really? A load of bullshit imposed on you: a suitcase full of wasted hours you have to watch over jealously so they’ll give you a check for the appropriate amount (never much without first negotiating with your boss’s superior, the board, some underling from HR). That smell of wall-to-wall carpet, disinfectant, and heating that sticks to you and stakes a claim on a patch of your mental space. And that’s where you’ll find good old Pedro-María. How funny you’d both think he was, I can just see you laughing. A programmer! The very pinnacle of grayness. But tell me why it’s worse to drive a taxi or to be one of those poor women who spend the day bathing patients than it is to strangulate your days stuck in a room reading and writing. Maybe a programmer has fascinating algorithmic experiences, while a scribbler racks up painful hours trying to get the balloon of linguistic imagination off the ground. I’m only saying there’s something very ambiguous in this idea of grayness. And don’t go thinking I’m going after your brother here, absolutely not. At least you can use his fat novels as guides to Barcelona streets.

And don’t think I mention Pedro-María by chance (the only undeliberate thing here is the fever of your rejection, which goes on and on). I bring his name up because in the meantime, since our disastrous re-encounter, we’d resumed our friendship. In a big way, too: we saw each other almost every day.

“You’re not going to believe this, Johan, but you gave me the wrong address.”

I answered the door. I opened up, let him in, let him hug me. I guess it was good to have someone get me out of the house, take me places where they treated us with the condescending respect reserved for regulars. It helps to feel superior to someone once in a while. It does my spirit good.

Plus, Pedro has a story, a good one — he’s got a wedding ring rolling around in some drawer — and he’s told it enough times to have mastered its dramatic effects; the guy knows how to build suspense. He took me on his motorcycle to the Miramar, a desolate building between patches of vegetation, and he told me about his disastrous marriage to a violent girl. They screamed at each other, she wanted more from him. He thought he could calm her down with a baby, but being parents only intensified the ferocious battle for time to themselves. He backed off, felt responsible, he wasn’t sure that Isabel could hold it together if they separated.

He tried to light a cigarette. His hands were trembling — delicate nerves. He told me that when he used to smoke in college he’d been convinced that there’d come a day when he would finally feel calm. A life crowned with a wife, children, in-laws, and even stranger creatures (siblings-in-law, nieces and nephews). A life so cushioned by the everyday, by family ties and civic duty, that it would be like living on a bed of pillows. He would leave the house to buy the newspaper and read it start to finish; Sunday’s main adventure would be the tortell cake. For years, he’d known he would recognize that day by its special light, and that it would come before he reached thirty. The bells of adult life would chime, and he would only have to puff out his chest and wait for them to hang the medal around his neck.

We leaned against the Miramar’s balcony, suspended over a city that seemed animated by the lifeblood of electricity, and he told me his daughter’s name. I watched him move his tongue inside his mouth, searching for a broken piece like he was extracting a thread of meat. He told me that Isabel had gone to live with an uncle in Seattle, and she’d taken the little girl with her; there was nothing the Spanish divorce laws could do. A cold fog of pollution quivered over the well-lit streets. He didn’t see her at all anymore, they barely spoke. It hurt him that something that had left an open wound in his flesh could be condensed in phrases recited in two or three minutes.

On another of those endless nights, I gave in and told him my story with Helen, and my life with you. I don’t know if it was in that order — I have no reason to respect chronology, time does what it wants with me, and doesn’t ask my permission. He sat there in the bar’s armchair, sucking on his cigarette; his pose emphasized the impression of an erudite Indian when he declared:

“You are no good at marriage.”

Of course, we did more than tell each other sad stories. Even when men are on the ropes, we have our pride; I told him about the day I put my sister in her place, and he filled me in about something much more important to him than photography: his apartment on Calle Córcega.

He invited me over one afternoon at five. The sky was covered in a layer of dirty clouds, and he’d drawn the curtains, plush and thick. So I had to wait for my pupils to adjust to the floating remnants of light before I could take in the height of the ceilings and the well-preserved plasterwork, a fugue of vegetable motifs. We entered slowly, with the respectful silence demanded in sacred spaces, although the ashtrays, cans, and bric-a-brac (bell, music box, mosaic) set about like souvenirs gave the room the air of a shop waiting for its final customer before closing down.

He looked at me attentively, anticipating my admiration and savoring it. The place smelled of the dregs of alcohol: sickly sweet liquids carelessly distilled. The cups and glasses were all over the room, as if he’d decanted them, one into another, over the course of several nights. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the hours here must have chased each other in tedious circles, caught unawares in a yawn that couldn’t be stifled.

Flowing straight from the wellspring of intuition, from the preverbal part of my brain, the impression hit me that everywhere you looked, you felt the absence of a woman. And it wasn’t just about cleaning and straightening (although that would have helped); what was missing was the spirit of renewal, the sense of space, the aromas.

“Impressive.”

I took two steps in, to avoid looking him in the eye. An air of familiarity washed over me. I’d been in apartments like this one, they’re all over Barcelona. They call them fincas regias—royal indeed — and twenty years ago you could have found the same hand-painted wallpaper and plum-colored curtains keeping the cornucopias and carillons (words you’ll only find in the dictionary by accident) company. If the place seemed to belong to another era, it wasn’t because hundreds of years had passed, but because no one decorated houses that way anymore, or lived in them. They’d gone out of fashion.

He showed me the vinyl records that he stacked without their covers, the little toy theater, the walnut knickknacks. He showed me furniture and objects torn from their intended uses, selected for their thick aura of the past. I would have ended up figuring it out anyway, but his little smile, smeared with satisfaction and a peculiar pride, lubricated the idea that this apartment served deeper purposes than merely sleeping and eating (nor was it just a bar). I was stepping into a space that was easier to profane than break into.

“It’s really something.”

We slung our jackets on a chair and he went into the kitchen to make tea. This turned out to be lukewarm water with a greenish tinge, in which charred fragments of vegetation floated.

“It’s roasted.”

I found myself juggling two ideas: on one hand, that apartment; on the other, the incredible fact that during the twenty nights we’d gone out, Pedro-María had not made a single off-color remark. Divorce happens to us all, but that reticence signaled some secret caution. If I could fit the two pieces together, I got the feeling I could shine a light on Saw’s state of mind.

It’s very difficult to drink tea while filtering out singed particles with your tongue. If I failed, it was because I got distracted thinking back to when we’d first entered the labyrinth of girls, and Pedro-María unwrapped the truth of his erotic potential.

It was one of the peculiarities of single-sex education: you discovered from one day to the next the effect you had on girls. There were inveterate cowards who, because they boasted blue eyes or fine proportions, randomly found themselves recalculating their social value upward. I was one of the best athletes in the class, so I had it made. Even so, during the first weeks of shared classrooms, before I learned to interpret the code of approach and rejection girls camouflage themselves with as naturally as desert vipers in the sand, my six foot two inches trembled top to toe at the prospect of running the gauntlet of those pretty dwarves with their little looks, their smells, their giggles and discouraging silences.

For Pedro-María it was disastrous. With that Saw-body, he had all the charm of seaweed. It’s also true that I could name twenty boys who started out from a similar place, but were not deterred. They took on the female species with the same determination as when they tried to get to grips with algebra, learn prepositional phrases, or master the plinth: they rolled up their sleeves and set about the task with a steady hand. But Pedro-María didn’t have that kind of temperament. His most lively sentence moved at the speed of a provincial train.

I took the initiative and brought him to parties. It wasn’t entirely altruistic, because it’s better not to go alone, and you’re much better off if your accomplice is like the dark eye shadow you use to emphasize the light in your eyes. But you can imagine how long it takes for even the best intentions to wither if you’ve got no vested interest in a guy’s success. Plus, the way Pedro presented himself made me look bad, too:

“My genre is the ballad.”

As you may have guessed, back then music was the artistic ambition shining on his hopeful horizons. What I mean is, there was no convincing any of those girls. A good coach would have recommended he make use of the wide margin he had to humiliate himself. And there was one afternoon he got down on his knees at the traffic light at Plaza Kennedy, begging Eva Prim (the girl who deigned to kiss him) to go all the way with him; not to mention that fateful afternoon when he took it into his head to pound on the door of the girls’ changing room shouting:

“Just give my dick a chance, it’s huge!”

But those were the exceptions to a manner characterized by abstention; in general, Pedro-María stifled his appetite. The result was a simple boy with crystalline, emotive eyes, not an ounce of evil in him, always willing to come running when you needed a hand with your antivirus or the new version of Windows. I guess I got used to thinking of him like that, one of those dependable classmates who never show up for a game of pool with any interesting news. Failing repeatedly is comfortable; it relieves you of false hope.

I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to spend those formative years without girls, without feeling their dilated eyes observing me. Without the girl who, if she also happened to be near the top of the ever-changing list of favorites, could provoke a surge of pleasure if you merely ran your fingertips through her flowing locks. If you were denied those easily inflamed, ambitious innocences, you ran the risk of never growing up. You’d remain locked inside your masculine tastes, or within the defensive irony that protects you from what you don’t understand, from what you don’t know how to reach, among people who never spread their wings. Even the ugliest little thing — who’d have all the necessary anatomy, and fantasies and soft ideas about the future, and who’d give off that gentle aroma if you embraced her tightly — could save you from having to discover physicality at an age when everyone else had moved on to more sordid business. They put your problem-solving abilities to the test, and in return they’d conveniently free you from the wasteland of role-playing games, comics, and science fiction, where single teenagers would spend their twenties and even their thirties, from zits to alopecia. Those antisocial little monsters are now the lords of your cultural world, but they don’t fool me — it was Pedro-María who took me to manga parties, to the Wookie soirée, and I know what I saw there: beady little eyes, cheap beer, dandruff, Cro-Magnon chicks who’d been kidnapped with a time machine. And always the smell of cold sweat, mildewed clothes, and even worse things: fear, the unmistakable stench of losing. It was never a place you’d go by choice.

Of course, that miserable start hadn’t stopped him pairing off and procreating. Guys much more offensive than him manage it, it’s the specialty of our species. Our dumpy little sisters get impatient, too, and we’ve all seen them descend the staircase of their expectations two by two. After putting up with so many adolescent slights, that’s when masculinity settles scores: you need us. If it were only women ever born, you wouldn’t have gotten very far; you all don’t even have enough drive to move house.

I was unable to establish a link between Pedro-María’s difficulties with girls and his taste for living in a museum. So I headed to the kitchen, ignoring my host’s gesticulations, planning to dump what was left of that nauseating swill. I was met with a mountain of dirty plates, covered with a once-edible paste. In the sink was two inches of standing water, a film of oil and grease floating on its surface.

Before I could leave the mugs on the counter he was behind me, wheeling out an elaborate excuse for that vileness:

“I don’t have a dishwasher.”

My eyes landed on a flat black box. I’d seen one like it in the living room, and they seemed to be strategically placed.

“Or a TV, or a radio, or a phone line. Have a look around if you don’t believe me, you won’t find a washing machine either.”

“Do you pile up dirty laundry, too? What do you do when there’s too much? Burn it?”

“No, the apartment has a laundry sink, fortunately. Have you heard of slow living? Society imposes those machines on us, and they all emit harmful waves. In ten years, the tumors we’re all incubating now will be rampant. We’re encouraged to consume, to live our lives in a hurry; the stress does incredible things inside your body, you can’t detect it because they rig the MRIs. It has political effects: it softens our brains, we put up less and less resistance, we’re grateful when they put us out on the street with a pocketful of small change as compensation. You know what comes next? Chips. They’ll implant them into our brains, we’ll be docile slaves, and we’ll barely notice the difference. It won’t be the government, don’t you believe that. They’re barely in charge. It’ll be the big corporations. We won’t have to worry anymore, they’ll tell us it’s for our own good. That’s why I don’t keep my money in the bank. I don’t pay the electricity or the water there, either, and I take my salary out the day after it’s deposited. I don’t want to do business with those people. They make things more and more difficult for me, but I know when the law’s on my side, and they can’t force me to let a private entity pay my bills for me.”

“And your computer?”

“That’s different. That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a tool I use to channel my creativity. Also, I can counteract the positive ions with the salt lamp. If you use that, you can sit at the keyboard for hours and your head won’t hurt. The energy stays balanced — only a few people know this.”

OK, as an off-the-cuff explanation it wasn’t bad. Too wide-ranging not to hit a few targets: that idea about the chips is out there, and it worries me. Plus, any way you look at it we all like to feel we’re one up on our neighbors. We want to feel we’re making the planet better somehow, improving its health or whatever goodness it is that a five-thousand-trillion-ton ball three thousand kilometers in diameter has in it as it hurtles through space, laden with its six billion humans. But don’t think the only loose thread was the flat black boxes. There were also the clothes from fifty years ago (and three sizes too small), the salmon-colored photos from an era when both of us were barely dreamed of: calculations of the species floating like tadpoles in our respective fathers’ most vigorous testicle. The bastard still had a gramophone, and blankets and sheets were thrown over the furniture (I lifted an edge) to hide the rotting upholstery and the termites’ tunnels.

It only lasted a week, but I briefly entertained a notion that Pedro the Chaste had bumped off the landlord. Who knows, maybe the sadness that turned him almost phosphorescent at night came from some radioactive experiment in managing regret. Lying on the sofa, one eye half open, too drunk to go to Rocafort and deal with the stairs, I came to think that he wanted to pin the crime on me. Such ideas could only worsen the circulation of blood in my veins, so I had to take the initiative, for health reasons. I didn’t stop until I was convinced that the man in the photos displayed all over the apartment was Pedro-María’s father, the same gentleman (dry as a herring because he was separating from his wife) who used to pick us up in his Audi after the game and take me home. The apartment didn’t belong to a murderer, but rather one of those people dedicated to living locked in with an extra-large slice of the past. On top of being a divorcé with no job and no appreciable talent for photography, Pedro-María’s pride and joy was his museum-house.

“Are you going to tell me what all this shit is about?”

He brought into the living room a chest full of toys: scale models, a yo-yo, spinning tops, Captain Thunder comics…they’d all belonged to his father, who hadn’t grown up on Córcega; we were in his grandparents’ apartment. I breathed a sigh of relief: I’d been unsure what to do with my memories of going with Pedro-María to Calle Moragas, greeting the doorman and running up the flight of stairs. It was like coming out of a dizzy spell. The spinning top had a silver ribbon wound around it that must have glinted as it whirled over the floors, as Pedro’s father tried to fill the oceanic loneliness of childhood with feeling. Pedro’s father had inherited the apartment, but he’d never had time to empty it or strip the wallpaper and glue from the walls and paint them white, because he went headfirst through the Audi’s windshield. So deciding on the apartment’s fate fell to Pedro-María. And it turned out that Isabel didn’t want to live there, not that I blame her. He didn’t set out to keep it, but the months went by and he felt incapable of renting it out: he couldn’t think where to keep the furniture, and it hurt him to imagine how little respect new inhabitants would have for his ancestors’ belongings. If he’d confessed to having his father’s ashes in those damned boxes I would have believed him, but when I sounded him out indirectly he swore he’d buried the whole body, that he took flowers to the grave every month. He invited me to go with him.

“All this furniture has a story, even if it doesn’t know it.”

“I’ll grant you that the gramophone looks spectacular, but I don’t see how your relationship with the dead would suffer if you got yourself a dishwasher.”

“Memories get mixed up, they’re often wrong, they’re no use to me. Are they to you? I’d be surprised. We lose too much. Think about it, what do you remember about your grandfather? And your great-grandfather? I’m sure it would all fit into a tiny box. It’s not fair. It’s absurd to come into the world only to leave nothing behind when you go.”

“But your grandparents should have already had a good German dishwasher. It’s pretty suspicious — are you sure your dad didn’t take it? I’m just saying, these forebears already lived their lives, and they can’t have been so bad, no better or worse than billions who’ve gone before or are living now. If you go on like this, accumulating all kinds of crap, you’re not going to have room to live your own life.”

“Whoever told you that life consists of doing a lot of things, of buying new furniture and throwing out the old? What do I get out of living only my own life? Don’t think I do this just for them. I’m not that altruistic, I basically do it for my own benefit. In the end, I wasn’t much to my parents, I wasn’t much help when they got divorced. They fought over me when I was little. I guess they conceived me as a beacon of hope — that didn’t turn out so well. My mother wanted a girl, and I think when I was born I ruined something precious. I can tell you I spent some crazy years in some awful places later on. Then when that period ended, I got my head straight, I fell in love, I left their lives. I couldn’t behave normally in front of people whose presence took me back to my childhood. I had to fight my own wars, against laws written by women who hate men and who haven’t allowed me to bring up my own daughter. I know how things are out there, but here in my home they’re not going to meddle. I’m protected by the right to privacy, these walls are my castle. And this time, Johan, I’m going to take care of my father, this time I won’t fail. When it’s all over, I assure you, he won’t have anything to reproach me for.”

There are some men like that, fighting either to contradict or to please fathers who, if they aren’t burned and scattered, are living off an IV drip and who never even loved or hated their sons all that much. Who knows if women’s self-esteem depends as much as everyone says on the male gaze. I can tell you, though, that far too many grown men feed off the approval or rejection of a ghostly father, some fake giant who fills their heads and enjoys the Final Judgment every day.

He asked me to go with him to the laundry sink. I was convinced that was the moment when all our “friends” would jump out with paper hats and party blowers shouting “gotcha!” But that marble anachronism wedged into the present didn’t stink of damp and mites, but of bleach and chemical soaps with traces of mint; it smelled of use. He took a box from the shelf (a simple, unfinished wooden plank) and showed me hundreds of photographs in bundles, tied with twine.

“These are the oldest ones. I also have some in black and white.”

The bundle he showed me was in various shades of sepia. They were depthless portraits, three-quarter shots of smiling people, snapped with no aesthetic intent. He showed me one of his mother in the old botanical garden of Montjuïc. It was hard to relate those fresh features to the worn-out face of the forty-year-old woman I met at an age when I had no clue about adult life; back then all humanity seemed split cleanly between young and old. What did one do after turning forty-five? Why even make it to fifty? What interest could those fantastic numbers hold? The modest style of her dress couldn’t hide the size of her belly, its burden of proto-life mutating to a genetic beat as it changed from reptile into fish and grew networks and tissues ever more complex. Until, finally, it made the mammal who now smiled before me, gauging my reactions.

We come home from vacations with four hundred photographs. Parents document every detail of their children’s baths, and even I took maybe twenty of you the day you introduced that exhibition. We save them on hard drives, put them up on the Web, shift them from one device to another. The images surround us like a living fog, bearing witness to our passage through the world. They’ve lost their sparkle of mystery; they’re like an app that lets the eye shorten distances in a shrunken world. But in the laundry room of the museum-house, photographs recovered their captivating energy: an old barite paper retaining time’s emulsions, conserving vestiges of light from the past. When they struck the nerves of the species’ current, transitory representatives, those outlines of the dead could stir up complicated responses.

“Now you’re here and now you’re not.”

He didn’t understand. He paused on one of those windows (what else would they be?) onto another decade: a tall man, prematurely gray, stood at the mouth of a mine. He was holding the arm of another man who was almost a dwarf, who clearly wanted to offer his best side to the camera for when the graying man told his wife, in some Barcelona salon, who he was and what he was doing next to him. I wonder what he’d say if he knew that two boys, who hadn’t even been born that day he was so eager to be photographed on his friend’s arm, would someday see right through his posing.

“The one in the middle is my father. He was thirty years old, working on the Porma Dam — they changed its name later, but I’m used to the real one. He told my mother a lot of stories from back then.”

From his other arm hung a woman in an incongruous white dress, with a timid look on a smiling face. It looked like the photo had been doctored, like she was a humorous addition by the studio that developed it.

“When I went to live with Isabel, I took a photo of Dad with me. He had messy hair and the dam was in the background, half built. I carried it in my wallet for five years, folded in half. One day I took it out and left it somewhere, and I’ve never seen it since. I suppose I should admit it’s lost.”

You could barely make out any color in all that sepia, but I would have bet any amount of money the girl was redheaded: skin spotted with freckles, that straggly hair that untangles into splendid waves when it’s brushed, the exaggeratedly, unmistakably sexual lips. I’ve always felt it was a stroke of luck to share the earth with that genetic anomaly, which has so many physiological peculiarities: you dark girls aren’t so dark, and blondes don’t play the part of blondes very well; you’re all more varied, maybe. But when it comes to acting the role of redheads, redheads are unbeatable. I’m very fond of carrot tops, even though I’ve never slept with one. The only one I kissed — well, I wouldn’t say she was bad, but she did something strange with her mouth, it made a weird sucking sound. It’s yet another debt in life’s array of possibilities that I need to collect before my heart suffocates.

“When you think about it, it’s a bit sad.”

“And the other two people?”

“I don’t know. That’s the thing. They’re my family photographs and I only know Mom, Dad, and Grandpa. I don’t know the others or what their names are. I don’t know what they were doing there.”

Turns out, the coffee grinder comes in handy, and I discovered that watering plants to music from the gramophone relaxes me. It so happened that we stayed out later and later and I spent more and more nights at Pedro’s house on Córcega. All that stopped me from officially moving into the museum-house and paying a share of the bills was that I had the claustrophobic premonition that if I did, I’d be burying myself in a social grave. If Pedro’s father or grandfather had collected stamps, bottle caps, or packets of sugar, we could have charged admission. But the apartment held only what Pedro’s dad left the day he’d gone out unaware that that very afternoon he would be crossing the symbolic threshold of his windshield, headed for the other world. It was a catalogue of aging furniture, an inventory of mediocrity, accumulated and held on to without forethought.

And though my heart problem called for more rest before putting my nose to the grindstone, I also didn’t move in because I’d already been plotting my next venture. I was taking inspiration from the Valencian shipowners: I was through with cheese-selling or bar-opening or apartment-showing. My specialization was going to be rich people. While I was falling at full speed, they’ve proliferated in this country: the upstarts, the climbers, riding high on scams either tolerated or encouraged by the city-planning authorities and other stables of corruption. An ocean full of fish weighed down by their full pockets, people who’ve accumulated constant streams of banknotes and bonuses and are just waiting for someone to introduce them to the refined pleasures they should be pouring their earnings into. Everyday guys who don’t know how to eat or drink or smoke (or fuck, if we’re going there, but I’ll specialize in families, I’m no age to start opening brothels), who get ripped off in hotels decked out in gold leaf, who get sold apartments with ceilings held up by cardboard Doric columns, who buy giraffes and let them die and rot in the garden because no one explained how to feed them. Builders, promoters, city planners, doctors who sell performance-enhancing drugs…people with those coarse but well-remunerated professions need someone like me, expelled from the fortress of the wealthy for breaking the rules, but with refined taste passed down by a father who’d been able to identify periwinkle blue and the notes of a Chypre cologne. Those poor men have heads full of blurry images of cars, watches, and fancy clothes, but they need a sherpa of luxury, a connoisseur. When you come back I’ll give you a job in the company, I’m going to need help if one of these johnny-come-latelies gets it into his head to start buying art.

In the meantime, though, what I did looked very much like living on Córcega, eating for free and helping Pedro-María develop his craft as a photographer. Given how little he touched the Nikon, though, I assumed he was going through a more cerebral phase of creative development. I tended to get up before him from the sofa he assigned to me as a bed (my feet almost fit), and since I’m of a curious nature, I started nosing around a little. You have no idea what you can learn about a person when you discover what they don’t even try to hide. It’s a shame my virtual incursions were limited. He opened a guest account for me on the Mac, and I enjoyed the stupendous highways fiber optics have to offer: I looked over forums about The Wire, I steeped myself in the latest scientific articles on Discovery Salud, I read the inanities my “host” wrote on Facebook about “friendship” (and that I wouldn’t have been able to bear if he’d ever said to my face), but I was never able to guess Pedro’s password, though I tried every combination of birthdays and anniversaries, just like they’d taught me in cryptography class. What I mean is that I could snoop around in drawers all I wanted, but the strongbox was off-limits; I couldn’t get to the map of his deepest, darkest concerns that was his browser history (and it’s very clear that my “best friend” is not the kind of person who periodically erases his bookmarks).

What surprised me most was not that the filthy pig gave his underwear a second chance (he kept the previous day’s socks tied in a knot so he’d recognize them), but rather a small plastic folder where he hid his bank book and the termination notice from his company: the salary dissolved whatever jealous impulses I may have had while staying under his roof and, in passing, I learned that he’d fought tooth and nail to stop them firing him for absenteeism.

Before opening any drawers, I made sure he was still sleeping; it’s such a nuisance that humans can wake up all of a sudden, that we don’t have a timer or something like that in our heads, especially when someone is taking the trouble to investigate us for our own good. I decided that since he was breathing with his mouth open, snoring like a beast, I still had a good half hour. So I had a scare when I heard the tap running — I barely had time to gather all the invoices and receipts I’d scattered over the desk. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one scrap of paper creep away, seeming to want to hide under the table. I stuffed it into my pocket in a ball.

“You’re not going to believe what I dreamed.”

I put on the unmistakable smile of a man listening to a little dream he doesn’t give a damn about — one he’s not even in. It’s a sign of disinterest so universal and recognizable it only proves the teller doesn’t care whether you’re listening or not, he just wants an audience onto whom he can dump the latest episode of the mental show he stars in while he reestablishes contact with the world of touch and consequences. I overcame my impatience (Pedro was entering a deep forest where all the trees were being uprooted by a balloon with the features of the sister he never had…), but not my curiosity about what was waiting for me crumpled up in my pocket. I sidestepped toward the hallway, and used the latch on the bathroom door. Sitting on the throne, I calmly read the invoice that confirmed my worst suspicions: Doctor Petra, Roger de Flor, ninety euros. I felt that male fury that rises from the stomach, unravels through the arms, and twists the joints of the fingers. Now, it wasn’t just the fact that he was hiding his meetings with an emissary of the headshrinking sect. It was the cost, the spending; it wasn’t rational or practical, it was domestic and administrative stupidity. If we were going to live together for a couple of weeks (my mancation), I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t allow him to take a shovelful of what little money he had left from his severance and toss it out the window.

I scrubbed my face with water to calm myself down. I had to be careful. I couldn’t exactly come out of the bathroom and start screaming in his face. The night before, Saw had had the decency to pay for dinner and drinks, and he said that since he’d figured I would stay the night, he had bought coffee for me. So I found him in the kitchen, wearing that indescribable robe. I approached, relishing the feeling of superiority that comes from following a well-planned strategy. But when I saw that for himself he was making a lightly roasted three-year-old Japanese tea, and that for me he’d bought a packet of that muck called Bonka (1.30 euros) that tastes like gasoline — and, on top of that, he was going to make me thank him for it — I turned my back superciliously and began to improvise.

“I don’t usually give advice, you know, but if you go on spending that money on hucksters every month, you’re going to lose the museum.”

“What museum are you referring to?”

“This apartment of your father’s — and your grandfather’s before that. You’ll have to rent it out and move to some proletarian neighborhood, like Sants. You’ll have to move into a little apartment in a building with no elevator, surrounded by fags and Peruvians. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“And what, in your opinion, have I spent all this money on?”

It was revealing that he didn’t just tell me to go to hell, that he didn’t remind me he was an adult and could do as he pleased. That tune he was humming was the music of emotional dependence.

“And don’t you believe that the new tenant will respect your father’s clothes, or the laundry sink. Of course not. He’ll destroy it to build an ironing room or a pantry. Everyone wants a new addition to brag about these days. It’ll be worse with the clothes. It won’t even take him a day to stuff it all into a bag and throw it into a recycling bin. He’ll fill your apartment with electronics and cables, he’ll profane your temple with a tsunami of cathode waves.”

“You’re presuming a lot here. I don’t follow. Sweetener?”

“It’s not a presumption, don’t give me that. I saw the receipt in the dining room, ninety euros, twice a month. You can’t afford that.”

“It’s a temporary thing. After a while some patients only go once every three months.”

“They’re never cured?”

“It’s called the maintenance stage.”

“Are you a truck? You have to stop that shit — shrinks are addictive. If they soothe the pain for a while it’s only in exchange for breaking a cog in your system. Then you’ll never be independent again, you’ll need it forever. If you’re overwhelmed it can seem like an authentic pleasure to have someone supporting you, and changing you while they’re at it. But it’s a disgrace.”

“You seem pretty familiar with it.”

“They destroyed my mother and Helen, all those psychologists and psychiatrists, not to mention the fifth column of psycho-magicians.”

“You’re wrong. Petra’s nothing like that. She’s a neurolinguistic programmer.”

“Sure, NASA-certified. Look, I’m not one to defend any smug scientist. They’ve got their own lapdogs, their media, their community. If you ask me, I wouldn’t put my trust in any bunch of people that can’t distinguish a pumpkin’s DNA from a human being’s, or who have stars explode on them when they least expect it, and who still don’t know if viruses are living or dead. Their vision might be limited, yes, but at least they work with protocols and methods. You can blow the whistle on them. But you can’t say the same for that charlatan. Programmer? What does she do, implant chips?”

“Don’t go there, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You haven’t lived it. She’s helped me keep going. It was her idea that I look up my old friends, and that I choose a ‘best friend.’ She’s responsible for our reunion. Think how much you owe her.”

“An oxygen mask would help you keep going, too.”

“She saved my life. I was thinking seriously about…you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“About bailing out.”

“You mean suicide?”

“That’s a forbidden word.”

“Like ‘poo’? Like ‘pee’? That woman is infantilizing you, and while she’s at it she’s going to clean out your bank account. You’re not going to change the way things are with torrents of good energy. Once you go out into the street again, even if it’s just to buy a toaster, you’re going to find the same aggression, the same human hostility. The only trick is to accept it, learn to dance to that tune. A man alone in his apartment, lying in bed, is a man in his apartment in bed, no veneer of spirituality. You don’t owe her anything. You could have felt better talking to a crisis hotline, or your mother.”

“I didn’t have the number.”

At that moment I’d forgotten that his mother (who was always so worried about the crumbs we dropped as we chewed) had, after five years of fighting, been asphyxiated by a cancerous ball. So I presume it was my eyes that said: “What number?”

“Neither of them.”

“What problems do you have?”

He pointed to the bottle, to one of the bottles. After the initial confession it got harder and harder to make out the kernel of truth amid all the fantasy, but Saw let me know that the rate of our drinking was not actually due to the effervescent effect of our renewed friendship, as I’d been inclined to believe; he’d already been drinking daily. By the time the moon came out to inspect the night sky, he was already pretty crocked. The office had been the only dam against his liquid vice, and now he’d lost even that; he was defenseless, at its mercy.

“I lied to you. It was absenteeism. I don’t even really like photography that much. I’m sick of fighting for everything, and gin is so tolerant and kind.”

It was hardest on the weekends, when he started to drink five minutes after he was out of the shower.

“On Saturday, my strategy consists of keeping the bottles hidden away. I prepare myself mentally, but it doesn’t help that I know my own best hiding places like the back of my hand.”

He’d given up going out. He traipsed around the apartment in his underwear (and a modest T-shirt in case a neighbor dropped by), alternating between phases of self-indulgence and fits of eloquent rage. Around mid-afternoon his brain managed to find some sort of clarity among the clouds brought on by the gin he sent streaming continuously toward his liver. The poor organ did what it could to dilate his spongy pores and drain the toxins.

“It’s not such a bad life.”

He told me about the horror of finding himself without tobacco on a Sunday, the crippling sensation. He’d throw on some sweatpants and start to wander the neighborhood: he looked for places where it wouldn’t be so humiliating to ask them to turn on the vending machine. In July and August the pavements seemed painted a sunny yellow, and he felt even more miserable.

“We’re friends. Friends play tennis, they go on trips. They don’t make themselves ill. Not so soon! Are we going to hug like a couple of diabetic old ladies?”

There you have an example of my grand attempts to bring him around: I was giving him a sermon! Just what my father would have done, though Dad wouldn’t have gotten up from the sofa and spoiled the immaculate line of his cream suit to pace through rooms like an outraged lawyer before a jury. Nor was I so surprised to find myself imitating Dad. He was my role model in life, the one that had fallen to me; if you and I had had children (if you’d wanted them), I would have spent my days overacting. I learned to recognize in the incipient expression on Pedro-María’s face the soft happiness of the child who discerns worry behind the scolding: the concern that those tall and strange characters, adults, had projected toward us when we were boys. And to hell with that stuff about friendship — since the moment he saw my photograph on Facebook he’d chosen me to give him a hard time, just so he could feel a little warmth again. The silly boy was looking for a daddy, Petra didn’t hug him enough, and so it made sense he’d turned to me. I’d been the only one at school taller than him.

He liked my tone, sure, but he wasn’t willing to listen to me. It was like when you hear a favorite song over and over, but it never occurs to you to shape your life to the lyrics. He’d fill another glass, turn on the transistor (sorry, but that’s the only word that fits the thing) or glue himself to the Mac screen to watch BBC news, fishing shows, or the festival of anorexics on MTV.

“George Michael is still alive!”

Well, I guess I didn’t really give it my all, either. I chastised him for drinking, for neglecting his projects (yeah, right), for flushing the best years of his life down the toilet, but it was just lip service. You cultivate friendships that allow you to shine, and what can I say — I’m vanity’s sweetheart. In my wretched emotional state, Pedro was like manna from heaven.

And don’t give me any crap about how I was overprotecting him, with maybe a little joke thrown in about how we were acting like a couple. That old chestnut of yours about how I repress my bisexual leanings — which according to you are latent in every Tom, Dick, and Harry — to the point of homophobia…I’m not in the mood. I understand that your literary aspirations mean you can’t resist holding original points of view, but I’m not going to buy that crap like it’s some age-old truism. How could I take anyone seriously who can’t even be sure what kind of genitals they like to go to bed with? Pedro and I weren’t even living together. We were just two guys recuperating from three bad marriages, taking a fresh gulp of male company, happy, stupefied, ignoring the clock, avoiding any exhausting domestic routines. It wasn’t even a temporary fix, it was about regaining our strength before setting off in search of new women. Things aren’t so bad out there for healthy-looking forty-year-olds: you have your contemporaries, intimidated by dark myths of never-ending singledom; then there are young women with their fantastic and favorable ideas about maturity; and then you have those astonishing fifty-somethings heading off to the gym. Not to mention the married cheaters, the dreamers, the unsatisfied, the adventurous, and the bored, all burning with libido. What an idea, that once you’re past forty the passion stops!

I was so inspired by the possibilities my fantasies spread before me that my heart skipped a beat the night I heard him say:

“I’m done with fucking. It’s just not worth it anymore.”

He managed to get up from the sofa he was sprawled on, but the momentum wasn’t enough for him to recover his human shape — he looked like an octopus with a tentacle trapped between two rocks. When he managed to reach something like a standing position, the idiot pointed to a box and told me to remove the contents: a bundle of photos, in splendid full color. They shone like fresh banknotes.

“My daughter.”

He told me again about the injustice of the divorce laws: defenseless men, female greed, the criminal belief that women are all delicate and weak and men are tough and selfish. He told me he never would have uprooted himself from Isabel’s life. He talked to me about the Fathers for Justice group. And I said: “Yeah, of course.” I took his words in and gave him back a ration of empathy: cold, urbane, weary. Going through the motions.

“They’re strong. Very strong. They put on feelings and take them off again like dresses. They’re like those marsupials that can interrupt their gestation at will. They decide when they’re going to stop loving. They complain about language, about how there’s no feminine equivalent for ‘womanizer’ that isn’t degrading…”

He stayed standing, holding on to the sideboard. Everything pointed to him falling flat on his face if he let go. He made to reach out, but with a combination of gestures and looks I managed to persuade him not to pick up the bottle. I should have helped him to bed, but the linguistic twist the conversation was taking struck me as terrific and unexpected.

“…but just tell me what the masculine equivalent of ‘gynoecium’ is? It’s just taken for granted that women have the right to band together and stay in the shadows. There’s a space reserved in language for that. And for us? Why wouldn’t we want to withdraw from the world and live together under the same roof and share costs, without bringing God and his son into it? Oh, no, our only option is to be exposed to the elements, the streets, the struggle. If you consider us individually, maybe men aren’t so great, but when we’re together we understand each other, we laugh, we have a good time. We don’t tear each other apart beneath all the social niceties like they do. Why don’t we just quit? Do you know? Me neither. Good-bye to all of them, they can go fuck themselves.”

“Because we want them….Well, I do, anyway.”

From deep inside him grew a smile that brought him onto his tiptoes. He took two steps and fell onto the sofa again; I was starting to feel awkward about lying down there later to sleep. Lately, people have been knocking at my door (it’s an expression — Saw’s the only person I see, and I write only to you) trying to persuade me that sex isn’t all that great, really, and the deep layers of physical attraction that can turn your head inside out are all in my imagination.

“Descarrega had the best solution.”

After a second I heard some cogs in my brain start creaking after having lain dormant for at least ten years. But there was no clarifying the rumpus of my disjointed memories. The acid aftertaste of astonishment concentrated into a single first name.

“Eloy?”

“Eloise Larumbe, our own Eloy Descarrega.”

“Eloy?”

He realized I’d gotten confused and was stuck in a loop, and he rummaged around for the right words to orient me.

“You didn’t know? He bought himself some tits, injected hormones, got fully lasered, had his cheekbones reconstructed and a good dose of noninvasive filler put in his lips, the full works. And you don’t have to spend a fortune anymore, or have them saw open your face or cram you with silicone. It’s getting cheaper and faster, and less painful. And reversible. Eventually we’ll switch in and out of genders like we go from country to country. The only hitch is the nervous system — they can’t give you a female brain. You bring home the body of a woman, but the soul driving the thing is a boy who understands you. Paradise. The only possible harmony.”

As far as I remembered Eloy’s features, they specialized in a sort of expression that was the dictionary definition of “befuddled.” He liked Star Wars figures; he’d had hundreds of them, the brat. He was effective on the court, a shooter, not very generous. It was hard to talk seriously with him, one of those crossword puzzles that we got tired of soon enough and solved by filling in the blanks with the word “faggot.” I didn’t think about it at the time because I tend to relate homosexuality to vice. I don’t know how to deal with boys who are just gay because they like other boys, then fall in love and go live together. And there was no denying that Eloy with tits must be a sight to see.

There were other questions I wanted to explore: Had Pedro seen him? Was the transformation complete? Could you buy a cunt, with all its complicated folds? Did it react the same way, get turned on the same? I knew doctors didn’t have a great track record with cerebral nerves. The awful state of my heart’s plumbing, the terror that an obstruction would snuff me out, had driven me to study the possibilities carefully, and I knew that even if they managed to isolate the mental meat, submerge it in a tank of collagen with its consciousness intact, they still didn’t know how to graft the brain onto a fresh spinal cord.

But I didn’t get to ask him anything, because Pedro-María lost the thread of the conversation and fell into the babble that generally preceded silent inertia. I grabbed him by the armpits and led him (or practically dragged him) to his room. The impulse to take off his boots for him ended there. He assumed an astonishing pose, almost indescribable, more typical of a creature with soft bones; neurologists should really start investigating alcoholic contortionism properly. Luckily that cretinous yogi couldn’t see himself. It shows the intelligence of our design that we sleep with our eyelids shut, that our faces remain beyond our field of vision, that the spirit or the soul or the character can scarcely recognize itself from outside, and we have to fall back on interpreters. And it’s lucky that psychologists and priests are a bunch of charlatans incapable of really opening our eyes. What good would it do Saw for a true reality tutor to sweep away the fine shroud of protective ideas the poor man wove about himself? Better that he not self-assess, better to live lethargically, wreathed in greenish shadows. Because the day he looks at himself with a cold and exacting eye, the day he takes the measure of the wreckage he’s buried in up to his eyebrows and that’s mingled with his very being — that day not even Petra can stop him tearing out his windpipe.

I left the bedroom with a decisive urge to be a better person. I smoothed the sofa cover, and it was only when I started to gather the glasses from our last few nights that it occurred to me how a liver specialist might interpret the last week’s alcoholic fugue state as a sophisticated suicide attempt.

You could develop a comparative theory of drunkards, using Helen and Pedro-María to illustrate it; they’d taken different routes to end up in the same class of bebedores. For Saw, the demands on him had made his headaches chronic, and alcohol helped him keep going in all his weakness. Helen wanted to devour the world, but she lacked the head for it. She soon got tired, and the few ideas she did have came out twisted, as if she were thinking with the wrong organ. Her tonsils, maybe. So Helen started dusting off the notion that she was strong, and could overcome the world’s resistance by the force of her body. And there you have the two of them, in their respective living rooms, wallowing in their alcoholic delirium, destroying reputations, sowing infamies, passing through euphoric periods when they convinced themselves that their isolated words — words that could never hurt anyone — pierced their targets like the marble letter opener I eventually gave to Helen so she’d stop opening envelopes with her teeth. The best medicine for Saw would have been to land himself one of those pretty and determined women who move up the ladder at work and leave you at home taking care of plants and small animals. As for Helen, her supposed salvation from the pit of alcohol and low self-esteem was that strapping boy stepping onto the Corb’s riverbank, matted with reeds, fearful of tripping and falling into the water that flowed with unusual ferocity in that stretch. After all, that was why we’d gone to the spa, whose idiotic lights were floating among the vegetation: to start over again together, rise above the everyday maliciousness that had diminished us. To give ourselves the kind of experience of forgiveness and renewed enthusiasm that love supposedly entails, to fall under the power we assume it possesses.

So I was happy to see her stop swaying and wobbling at the edge of the water. I took two long strides toward her like a valiant prince in a story, and even if I did grab her arm with more force than was strictly necessary, the main thing was to get her feet away from the edge and onto solid ground.

Helen was the type to argue for hours as if her life depended on it, until finally she crashed, exhausted. If I kept probing her once she was worn out, she’d forget all her crazy accusations, as well as the more reasonable parts of her argument. She didn’t try to reconcile the various ideas she held of me, and I resigned myself to being two (or even three) different people in her mind.

She looked me up and down, gazing half a second longer than necessary at my lips.

“It’s cold.”

The wind had raised goose bumps on her arms. I thought of the little bubbles that float up from the bottom of the pan and burst on the surface. She enveloped herself in my body, defeated by marital solicitude: Helen didn’t know what to make of her escape, she was unable to turn it into anything useful that she could prolong. I smoothed her hair away from her face; that always calmed her down.

“Let’s go back to the bedroom.”

She said it in a resigned tone, as if giving in to a plan of mine. She didn’t miss the chance to qualify it, maybe unconsciously.

“Let’s go back to the hotel.”

We shared an instinctive optimism about our future as a couple, but we had to proceed carefully. We owed a good part of our reconciliation to exhaustion, and to our habit of leaning on each other. The raw zones of pride, distrust, and shame were still exposed and sensitive. One glancing blow and they would flare up all over again.

We crossed the filthy little forest and the canal. We followed the lights of the resort; the bright circle of the old clock tower was our North Star. The incongruous grunting of the pigs didn’t help me calm down — my spirit was still fouled with a bitter substance. The sexed aroma of Helen’s flesh reached me, mixed with clothing fibers and dust. I still couldn’t begin to guess at the movements of her mind. I suppose I was hoping our hearts would move closer to understanding all by themselves, and that a generous and completely spontaneous gesture would breathe life into their depths.

It didn’t help that since we’d been married we hadn’t taken any decent vacations, that we’d lived in small apartments with rooms the sun barely touched, feeding ourselves on the narrow economies allowed by two checking accounts. If we wanted to stay together, the only thing to do was apply the old remedy: bring in more money. I was going to have to find her a job, especially if the kid was going to spend time with us — a thought that filled me in advance with pride. I was turning these problems over when I felt her fingernail pressing into the skin between my index finger and thumb. That vestigial web is already pretty sensitive, and the next thing I felt was the touch of her lips on my neck: a kind of suction that we’d had a very precise name for when we were growing up, which I couldn’t think of just then.

“Jhaaapsn…”

“What?”

“Jhapsm…”

A blustery wind tore the sound from my ears, breaking the words into confused units of noise as it made the treetops rattle like coins in a pocket. But I only had to see her smile — her lips damp, that trace of playful greed growing out of her face like a second nose — and I was convinced that Helen was starting to take our reconciliation seriously. We were going to have a good time, our greatest joint asset. We’d return to the hotel hugging and laughing, ready to just skip dinner. Projected onto the wall, our shadows looked like the ghosts of a couple of lovers.

When we reached the bar, Helen turned her head and stared fixedly inside. She let go of my arm and approached the window, drawn by the sound of a magical flute that only she could hear. I stood where I was, enjoying the fresh air and the lassitude of the sweet, chlorinated pool water. I could only see the bottles floating on the shelves in the bar: the Cyrillic letters of the newly fashionable imported vodkas, the sandy color of the whisky, the red hues of the girly liquors with flavors of dried fruits, and the irresistible sapphire blue of Bombay. The overhead fluorescent turned on in two long flashes, and I caught sight of the black man pressed to the window, a dark-sheeted ghost; the glass in his hand looked filled with emerald light and he was smiling, intensely interested in us. Laugh all you like, but I found it soothing that a being of his demeanor, with the noble expression of a diplomat who’d traveled back from the future, was there to keep me company at the decisive point of my marriage.

Helen moved back toward me, and I don’t mean she put one foot in front of the other with the intention of coming closer. Rather, she took advantage of the basic step of human locomotion to display her hips and shake her upper cargo. She completed this demonstration of dynamic flirtation with the exact neck rotation needed to lift the mass of her hair and let it fall in a layered cascade, capricious and hypnotic, almost without affectation; I felt my blood start to pound. The waiter, the nocturnal drinkers, my somber guardian angel (sweet companion) were all there just to look at her. I saw it as a good sign that she was getting back her taste for flaunting herself.

“Did you see the black man?”

“What black man, Freckles?”

“The one who’s been looking at us since we got here, John. Well, looking at me, watching me. You never notice anything, it’s no wonder you don’t get jealous. He must be nearly sixty. It didn’t even discourage him that I was with Jackson, a child, for the love of God, those people have such dirty minds. I guess they can fool you Spaniards, they’re a novelty here, but they can’t pull one over on a girl from Montana — they only think about drinking and fucking, they’re full of sick half-thoughts. You really haven’t noticed? How can you be so careless? I don’t feel safe with you.”

“I was too focused on you.”

“Tall. Bald. Vicious eyes. But he won’t bother us again.”

“Oh, no? And what did you do, show him the butt of a gun?”

“This.”

And she bent her knees to give more force to that ghetto gesture that consists of gathering your fingers in a fist and letting one escape, stiff and erect, in the middle. And although I’ve never really known what it means (something to do with the anus) I know that had my father been there to see it, the shame would have corroded his flesh.

“He can go fuck himself.”

That’s what my wife said, my love, the mother of the child who was going to be “ours,” and in decent Spanish, before she took my arm once again, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done.

I was a guy who liked silk scarves and riding horses, who couldn’t drink cognac from a glass that didn’t have a narrow mouth to concentrate the aroma, who had to make an effort to repress the paternalistic habit of calling the waiter over with a clap, and who’d had, as a child, a woman employed for various purposes that all fit under the obsolete name of “service,” who came every morning to put on my socks and fold my pajamas (it’s not that I hid this from you, but you have to admit it’s not the kind of memory that fits easily into ordinary conversations). And Helen was the creature I had married: ignorant, rough, impertinent, but bold and full of energy and life; the girl who’d pulled off my husk of pretentiousness, the tegument of refinement that covered me. With no protection bar my own sensitive skin, she was the girl I had hurled myself with into the murky, hot, and tumultuous zones of the human breeding ground. Beneath the first layer of stars in that clear sky, under all that luminous dust sprinkling us with energy from celestial bodies packed with inert material, my racing pulse confirmed how much I loved her healthy and lively vulgarity. Those were the spiritual reasons I had married her, and they were still good ones.

I was overcome again by the color of the lighted pool, the smell of the dianthus, by the incomprehensible abundance of things that have shape and symmetry when you move among them holding the hand of the woman you desire. Helen was talking to me, but the words got lost in my ear without reaching my brain. My erotic imagination was running riot, composing complicated and tangled scenes the way it’s wont to do. The breadth of everyday desire had concentrated into a gluttonous craving to burrow into her innermost folds. My impatience distorted every step we took. It doesn’t matter how often I get this horny — I don’t think in this life I’ll ever get used to the lusty chaos that rides roughshod over my normal thought process.

I opened the hotel door for her, and we snuck stealthily in (what resonances words drag behind them, what echoes). We avoided the dining room, where a handful of mummies, animated by stubborn hearts ignoring all their bodies’ vital signs, were ingesting pastes and purees and other crap you can swallow without really needing to fire up the gastric ovens. Helen used to double over with laughter when I opened doors for her. If I pulled her chair out she trembled with a shameful pleasure, bubbles in her nose: the poor girl felt like a heroine in a historical drama. Sisi, or a Romanov princess, Anne Boleyn, any of the Tudors, it didn’t matter, to her they were all muddled with the same vague idea of a luxury she tasted only because she kissed a man who had been educated in the ancestral laws of courtliness. I had a hard time convincing her that it was out of deference that I let her enter the elevator last, that it was the done thing to let the most important person spend the least time in those moving coffins. That night, when she begged me to take the long way up because she’d had a dream that the elevator’s walls were closing in on her like a trap, I didn’t even try to make her understand why a gentleman must never let a lady go first on the stairs, especially if they’re not wearing skirts but jeans or white pants (Helen’s vulgar specialty) tight over the buttocks. It was late, we’d already fought, and bad as the food was, that vapor of seasoned aromas, of grease and oil singed on the grill, had woken my taste buds. If Helen turned her back on me I could start emptying my pockets of nuts without hearing her nutritional advice or renewed reproaches about my gut (which was barely even visible).

What’s more, Helen’s backside was intimately connected to her brain. She was the sort of person whose movement reminded you that, biologically speaking, we start out as tadpoles with a cerebral mass that lengthens into a strong medullary tail, protected by a bony spine, which melts into myriad nerves and vessels irrigating the adipose hills of the derriere. And I promise you that not only did those buttocks manage to express her moods more clearly than the features of her face (the social slog had taught her too many strategies of disguise), but you could also upset or calm her down depending whether you chose to caress or pinch it.

Anyway, I was on fire when I went through the door of that damn room, and it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm a bit that the floor and bed were littered with the wreckage of our battle. I’m not saying I expected her to kneel down and kiss my feet, but I certainly didn’t anticipate her scurrying away when I moved in resolutely to kiss her, two and three and four times in a row: she pressed her lips together, clenched her teeth and, worst of all, started ridiculously thrashing her tongue to interrupt my passionate crescendo.

“No.”

And she fell back onto the bed, cutting off the most natural channel of communication and starting a conversation instead, in a rather delirious, completely incongruous way.

“Please open the window.”

By this point I’m no longer surprised when a woman misinterprets my exquisitely suggestive moves as mere flirting; you all do it just because you feel like it, because you think it’s funny to see our reaction. And don’t give me that bullshit about the complexity of feminine sexuality — that is such a tired old excuse. Give me, a thousand times over, the vigorous straight line of my desire, which increases in potency and fervor as it gets closer to climax; such an efficient device, I don’t know how it could be improved upon. But what can you do? I know the rules of the game…I can live with the candles, the little massages, and the mortuary-style background music. It’s just that with Helen I’d gotten used to a generous response to my manly appetite. While I was opening the window and she was lighting a foul-smelling Lucky, I calculated that our night of reconciliation had already met two roadblocks. Enough was enough, I deserved some gratification, so I know I didn’t sound entirely calm.

“And now what?”

“We talk. We have to talk. Seriously.”

“About what?”

“I told you! On the way back here, I told you and you smiled! You don’t listen to me, you never listen, you’re such a hypocrite.”

I should have replied that I hadn’t understood because of the wretched wind, and because she’d been giving me a hickey (the term popped up in the sentence of its own accord, from God knows what warehouse of memories). But she was too upset by the mess of clothes, the scent of our recent battle. Helen was trying to hold back her rage, even as her thoughts kept slipping forward, driven by adrenaline. If I gave a wrong answer she might try to scratch out my eyes. I was going to let her talk — encourage her, even. The night could only end one way; my body deserved it. Being the more intelligent one had to be worth something.

“You said a lot of things.”

“It’s the only thing that matters to me — why do you think we’re here? About Jackson, we have to talk about Jackson!”

It was her tone of contained desperation, the still-damp tips of her hair, the ring of smoke that drifted from her lips…Helen clearly saw herself framed in a scene from the type of TV movie where a blonde and indomitable woman decides to fight, for her son’s good, against the man she loves.

“You heard me, but you haven’t said anything, you haven’t even thought about him, about what he means to me.”

Here she was wrong: ever since I found out that boy had made his way through her interior to plop into this feeling world, I’d been searching for stretch marks on Helen’s thighs, on her buttocks and belly, on the lower part of her back where her silhouette swelled into her hips. I couldn’t believe I’d missed the marks from giving birth.

“I thought we came here to save what’s left of our marriage.”

“We can’t fix anything if we don’t resolve Jackson’s future.”

So Grandma and Grandpa had grown tired of little Jackson. I couldn’t blame them, it must be shitty to be old, on top of having so little time left. Who would want to add dealing with the neglected child of their dizzy daughter, the long-jump princess, to all that?

“I don’t want him to live with his father.”

That line reminded me of my old problem on the court, when I could sense that my opponents’ movements were dangerous, but I couldn’t guess their intentions until my big body was already in a two against one. Helen wasn’t playing the role of the desperate wife; this scene belonged to a movie whose first half-hour I had missed, one that relegated me to a secondary role. It was the story of the war against that Kansas gynecologist, the first husband, whose seminal contribution had resulted in Jackson’s conception.

“They won’t let you take him?”

“Women in the United States are protected by good laws, it’s not like in Spain — I was born in a civilized country. Children belong to their mothers. Daddy arranged everything with a lawyer in Boston. I just need us to get married, more seriously this time, properly.”

Some future that boy had waiting for him, with a mother addicted to playing mankind’s defenseless victim. Whatever his mother might say, people never change, for all the promises they make us. I knew that I was going to be the one making Jackson breakfast while she fought off her hangover with a large black coffee. The paperwork for enrolling him at school would fall to me, the figure with nervous eyes waiting for him after practice (did you doubt I would sign him up for basketball?) would be mine. And if Jackson didn’t feel comfortable with me, if he defied me? Children should really evaporate when divorce papers are signed. I’m not saying they should die, just that they should end up in the same limbo as all the other complicated affairs that build up when a couple separates.

“I don’t know if you’re thinking about this the right way, Freckles. You want to stick him with us in a seventy-square-meter apartment?”

“We’ll look for another, a bigger one. I’ll get a job, things will work again. It has to work again.”

And anyone would have believed her, if only we hadn’t been going at each other since the moment we’d been left alone. Jackson wasn’t going to stop us — it was our way of being together.

“What are you thinking about, John? Don’t look at me like that, if you look at me like that I don’t know what you’re thinking! This is about understanding each other!”

“I’m thinking about problems. One after another, in formation. The kind of army that for you and for me is invincible, one that’s going to split our heads right open.”

“Speak clearly. Can you speak clearly? This is an important conversation, the most important one of my life. I have to understand it!”

“I don’t see it clearly, Helen.”

“See what?”

“It’s a crazy idea. Come home, let’s see how it goes, then we can bring the boy.”

“You’d do it if it were your son, he’d be your family then. But he’ll never be your son.”

I understood the thought disguised under her crazy talk. It was a difficult argument to refute (and it worked in my favor), but the truth is that I had started to feel something like complicity with young Jackson, who, six or seven years earlier, wrapped in a clear, damp chrysalis, had come out through the same opening I’d dedicated myself to working so mightily during my marriage, one I’d kissed out of love every day. We shared an inverse experience of the same ruby red that opened between delicate folds under the silky hair (or do they always shave women in labor?). His tiny little nostrils had enjoyed the same aroma. I was moved at the thought of being part of that family circle of intimacy, but I wasn’t sure how to explain it to Helen. I saw her tongue moistening a new dart, and I knew she would have taken even the most innocent carnal reference as an unpardonable obscenity — some people just don’t know how to avoid taking things personally. But I give you my word that I was reaching the most tender heart of what we had gone there to revive. I would give Jackson good advice, he could have me as a role model.

“You’ve convinced me, let’s try.”

“What?”

“Come on, Freckles. Let’s get in bed, let’s fix this, and in a few days you’ll come back to Barcelona with the boy, with Jackson. With our son.”

“He’s not your son. It’ll be a hassle for me, too, you know, to bring him.”

I’m not saying Helen didn’t love her son. I’m just saying it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea if, when they’d checked her into the hospital, they’d taken the opportunity to fit a heart into her chest. I had the impression she was putting out her cigarette on her thigh, but she must have had an ashtray or something.

“I have to get him away from his father. You don’t know what that man is capable of. He can’t get over me. He’s a jealous animal. He wants to use Jackson to hurt me.”

I think Helen did have the makings of a mother. I confirm it every time I see a forty-year-old woman pushing a stroller with a baby inside. They don’t hide their femininity and they get their share of looks, but those looks just slide gently off, deflected by the bond between woman and child. In Helen’s case, though, the child had arrived too early, when she was a young animal with a character that would flatten you like a wave crashing over your life. Jackson was an annoying obstacle, too soft to contain the fire — and the greed and the natural curiosity — of a twenty-year-old woman. Opportunity, timing, occasion: the same mess as always.

“He’s coming with us, that’s that. I’ll protect him.”

And OK, I don’t think it was too much to ask that she get up and thank me with a big kiss. But I really didn’t expect her to just stay sitting there, her furious expression unchanged, with the same goal: shake off male domination. Only the enemy had changed: the presumptuous macho she had to put in his place was me.

“There’s something else.”

“Go for it, Freckles. I’ve still got a little skin left on my heart.”

“I’m sick of the way you talk to me. You act like I’m nothing but a body, you tell me that with my personality I’ll be selling handkerchiefs in the street once my tits are sagging. It’s emotional blackmail. I still have a long time before that happens. Plus, science can stop it.”

“Don’t you believe that. You Teutonic models wear out faster. Ten years and your lovers will be confronted with stretch-marked rashers of skin…I’m just telling you the facts, you can choose whether to listen or not.”

“I’m not Teutonic, I’m an American citizen.”

“Can you tell me what continent Teutonia is on?”

“You’re not going to provoke me. Spanish men are weak and backward. In case you forgot, I certainly didn’t have to make any effort to seduce you. Things are different in America, especially the women.”

“In New York, Freckles, they would take you for a loud-mouthed doorwoman. Here, at least you’re blonde, and once your tits are saggy you can head to Istanbul — the Turks are innocent and impressionable. Too bad you’re not very tall.”

“They’re a bunch of conceited assholes in New York — anemic vegetarians, they all have low-quality semen and dried-up ovaries. Most of them are homos, that’s why they have to import Chinese and blacks.”

“Come on, they shut the door in your face there, too. You’re a product of Montana, and if I get tired of you you’ll go straight back there. How long did you live in New York?”

“Six months. Long enough. I was in training the whole time. You wouldn’t understand because you’ve never done anything that requires discipline, that’s why you’ve lost all your father’s money, that’s why if you can’t feed off my energy you’ll just stay stuck in place.”

“Go back to Montana, Freckles, it’s your natural habitat. The only place in the world you won’t be out of place.”

“We’re talking, now we’re talking, right?”

“Yes, it would seem so.”

“You know why I came to Barcelona? Why I attached myself to you?”

I didn’t bother to reply.

“In Montana there were a lot of high-quality men, but all the women were so sophisticated and beautiful that you had to fight tooth and nail.”

“Right, that’s why you were a virgin when you got to Madrid, a victim of the Darwinian struggle.”

“Next to the big-assed Spanish and the anorexic Catalans, it was easy to seduce you, but in Fuokville it wasn’t enough to have a good body. I had to use my intelligence, I had to use words.”

“You don’t say. Wait, I’ve got to hear this standing up. Just what is the verbal bait one uses to hunt males in Montana?”

“I used to tell them I had a small vagina. Don’t laugh. I don’t know what feeling a tight vagina gives you, and it kills me that I’ll die without knowing, but it was infallible, they melted, they knelt at my feet.”

“You’re an idiot. That’s your secret, Helen. You have a ball full of sawdust sitting on your shoulders, stuck together in the most primitive way humanity has to offer. If you’d let me smash your skull and pry it open, stick some cotton in there to soak up the blood, and drive a needle into your brain to extract a gallon of your cerebrospinal fluid, I’d bet my balls it would be made of greed, provincialism, and malice.”

“You’re jealous.”

“You were the one who came crawling back to me.”

“You’re dying of jealousy.”

“I want you, you damn idiot.”

“You were always a jealous dog, you just hid it.”

“You know what, Miss Montana? If you’d taken that stupid, irresistible face of yours and told them you had a wide and gaping vagina, they still would have crawled after you. You’d get the same result confessing you had two cunts, you can take my word for it. With everything you’ve got, after prancing in front of them, believe me, you couldn’t keep them off even if you announced you were a guy. Arousal is very forgiving.”

“You’re talking too fast, I don’t understand.”

“You know that before I met you I couldn’t even imagine how sexy an idiotic face can be? I liked dark brunettes and their air of mystery. Luckily, when it comes to desire we don’t have to be consistent. If I’d stuck to my taste in fine, soft, well-mannered, tidy women, I would have missed out on all your splendor. You poor fool, poor lovely fool, with your little eyes so full of ambition, with all your mindless nonconformism, you’re marvelous. You’re not going to stop driving me crazy, we’re never going to work. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do you want us to get back together?”

“I don’t want you to leave me, John. I’ve invested too much time in you. I don’t want to be abandoned again, the first time was enough. I don’t want to feel humiliated again, like I’m dirty. Anyway, it’s never how I imagine it’s going to be, and I like the way you talk to me, the way you touch me. I’m not going to let you say good-bye.”

“You know what, Freckles? I’m going to tell you the secret of the world. I’m going to tell you why you’re a miserable person, and why you’ve made me feel so wretched for a year and a half, and the best part is I’ll tell you this for free. Don’t think I’m stingy or one to keep secrets. If I didn’t tell you sooner it’s because, though I’ve had some vague impressions, I’ve only just now pulled the threads together. You know me, I’m not a quick study, but when I know where I’m going I can move like a bulldozer. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening, talk more slowly. This is entertaining.”

“Look, boys act like they’re men before they are. We puff out our chests, we show off our package, we unbutton the second button of our shirts, all in the hope you’ll be impressed. We make you laugh, and that’s good, but you never believe us, we can’t keep up the act. We play at being the stronger sex, but there we are, trembling with emotion in front of the very organisms that hold the key to a paradise on earth. You develop gradually, so none of you understand what it’s like to have those testosterone bombs exploding at twelve, thirteen, fourteen. They burn down entire vines of neurons to their roots, make hair spring out all over our bodies, our features change in fits and starts. We are placed here amid all this sensation to plant the seed in the carnal tunnel and ensure the continuation of the species. Understand?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter, because you see it, you get it, you make the most of it. And the thing we hardly ever take advantage of is that you haven’t finished growing either. We give you credit for physical charms that you’ve developed effortlessly, from the force built into your bones, into your cells, into the double helix of the genetic code. But in the end you go on being girls, scared little girls, with your teddy bears and their imagined personalities. We’re afraid of you, and we take what comes out of your mouths seriously, but you’re not sure of anything. Lonely little girls, weak, afraid of the dark, of solitude, of the masculine drive to devour life. Maybe you and I still have a chance. Get in bed.”

“What?”

“Get in bed.”

“Why?”

“Get in bed, you want it.”

“It’s not that simple, we’re having a discussion.”

“And by discussing it we’re only courting disaster. You talk and talk and talk, and I talk and talk. Oh boy, do I talk! And the good intentions float away, lost, like helium balloons. How sad it is when you’re barely three feet tall and you feel the string slipping out of your hand and you watch as the balloon disappears up toward the atmosphere. You know what? I always imagined the sky as a lid. It scared me to think of it being so deep, and that mile by mile its color changed and the blue got darker and darker until it vanished in that pitch-black expanse where living planets float, if there are any, along with the sterile planets and all the planets that have died.”

“You’re making this up as you go. You’ve never in your life thought about this before.”

“See? Words are too much for us, they get tangled up, they lead us to strange places. Get in bed. When have our bodies ever failed us?”

“You want to go to bed? Now? With nothing fixed?”

“We’re not going to fix it any other way, why do you think we were given arms and hands and lips? Get in bed right now, damn it, let’s solve this our way, don’t make me beg you.”

“Don’t do this to me. I don’t agree, I don’t want to, it doesn’t have to be like that. Plus, I’m on my period.”

“And since when has that stopped us? It’s only liquid, juice, bodily fluid, a bit thick, but doesn’t it flow from your beloved body? The body is full of possibilities. It was that way the last time we saw each other, and anatomy’s fairly reliable, it can’t have changed that much. You know what, Helen? I feel life in my hands, you can’t imagine how much I like being alive, how incredible it is! Dying is repugnant, the fastest way to lose what you cherish most. It’s not for you or me, we have too much ahead of us, and we’re going to spend it together, so you’d better get a grip on yourself. Being dead is as sad as the time before you were born. I’m sure you don’t remember that time when you hadn’t yet been born — what could you remember?”

“Shut up. Don’t talk so fast, you’re confusing me. You’re like one of those movies that wants to make you think, and I don’t like thinking that much anymore, it scares me these days. We didn’t come here to fuck, we’re here to make up. This is about love.”

“It’s the same thing, one leads to the other. It’s natural, when it comes to love it’s the only way, anyone will tell you the same.”

“It’s not the way.”

“And what is the way, you damned blonde idiot?”

“Talking.”

How I would have liked to pierce the heart of her ignorance with a spear.

“Talking?”

“Yes, I talk and you listen.”

I knew the look she gave me all too well. She wasn’t going to move a millimeter. The part I could see was only the tip of a colossal mass submerged in a mixture of absurd ideas, superstitions, stubbornness, and rich veins of contempt. It would be simpler to separate her head from her neck by spinning it like a screw cap than to get her to change her mind.

So I got up, slammed the door, and left.

“Not like that, not like that, it doesn’t have to be like that. Come back. Come back, John. It’s not like before. That’s why I brought you here…”

After I turned the corner in the corridor I could no longer hear her needling little voice, as hoarse as if she were at the bottom of a cave.

I went down the stairs two at a time. I didn’t stumble even once — none of these clogged arteries back then. Healthy tissue, bright blood, how idiotic to feel washed-up in our late twenties. The dining room was almost empty, there were only a few groups of two or three old folks chewing their infusions; dirty silverware, plates with the remnants of food on crumpled tablecloths. At the other end of the room I saw the open door to the kitchen. In the rectangle of light, two young waiters were smoking, relaxed.

And what now? What was I going to make of my escape?

Outside, only the pool and the terrace and a gloomy night awaited me, two or three degrees colder. But I couldn’t capitulate and go back upstairs. Waves of testosterone and excitement were feeding my fury; I felt like charging at something. So I went down a corridor decorated with fussily arranged aboriginal paintings and little lamps considered “modernist” by the morons who buy them. I opened the door and went into the bar, and I found myself looking around in search of the black man. It was a long shot that he’d still be there, it was already fairly absurd that the place was still open.

“I’ve been watching you. You could use a drink.”

I felt his hand, heavy and strong on my shoulder, and felt instantly calmer. I let him lead me to the bar, holding back the first thought that occurred to me and betraying no surprise that he spoke Spanish.

“What’ll you have?”

“Gin.”

“Gin.”

“And tonic.”

We took the two glasses with their wedges of lime and made our way through the dense, aqueous atmosphere to sit on the striped leather sofas beside the picture window. There was a cold draft, but the trembling of my hand had set in upstairs, in our room.

“I recognize the state you’re in, my boy. That blonde has pushed you to the limit.”

“You have no idea how far.”

“I can imagine. I know when a white guy is on the edge. It’s a talent I have.”

“Huh.”

“You know how it works?”

“No.”

“Your skin turns so pale I can see the darkest currents of your thoughts. To tell the truth, it’s kind of gross.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“It’s just a little joke. I’m Jack Mabus.”

He gave me his hand.

“Joan-Marc Miró-Puig. But no one calls me that. They call me anything but: John, Johan, Marcos, Juan…anything other than my name. I don’t know why my parents chose it.”

We let a few minutes go by in silence. They were heavy with manly vibrations, and they soothed me. I started to feel better. I would have happily spent the rest of the night there, with him.

“White women don’t know what they’re saying. They speak the same way they sweat. I never listen to them.”

“Huh.”

“I know from experience. I married one. She took away the thing I loved most.”

“And how’d it turn out?”

“I went to the other end of the world and I took it back.”

The darkness outside increased the feeling of intimacy. The exterior lights gave the slightest impression of a golden, oscillating aura. It seemed to come from a near future.

“What do you do?” he asked me.

“Well, let’s just say I’m adapting to the waning conditions of my finances.”

“And her?”

“Nothing.”

“No good. A person needs to have work.”

“A reason to wake up in the morning, right? I feel the same.”

“No, it’s not about waking up. It’s about staying entertained. The mind is a runaway train, no one knows where it came from and you never know where it’s going to take you. If you want to stay with her, find her a job. It shouldn’t be hard, she looked like a determined girl. She’ll start to get involved with her colleagues, and she’ll come looking for you when she gets scared. Let her come home exhausted.”

“Is it the same with black women?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always married white ones. I like white women. How’s the gin?”

“Excellent.”

The window had become a plate of dark blue, through which only a pale moon was visible. I felt my casing of warm flesh.

“It’s been a terrible day ever since we got here. You know what cheered me up? Seeing your grandson, all that energy. It lifted my heart,” I said.

“Grandson? Oh, no, no, you’ve got it wrong, how funny. He’s my son. And yours, what’s his name?”

“Jackson.”

There was something loose among my thoughts that I couldn’t pin down, and in the sky a blurry band of tenuous blue was growing with cruel slowness.

“His biological parents named him. I’m innocent of that at least, though I could be accused of worse things.”

My pulse pounded behind my eyes. In an hour the sky would be red, gashed open as if with a knife.

“Why did you notice us?” I asked.

“Well, how should I put this, the two of you together stand out in this place. Like me and my boy, I suppose. We were fated to see each other. Didn’t you spot us?”

“I suppose so.”

“I was interested in what I saw. I’ve had a pretty complicated life. You wouldn’t guess how old I am, so many countries, so many outrageous experiences. I’ve never had much time to think, I had to stay on the move. I’ve spent entire years running and hiding. I guess you could call me a man of action, although I earned my living for twenty years by watching and interpreting. I thought every life was singular, unrepeatable, made up of unique experiences. That idea kept me going, it helped me control myself. I’ve loaded crates, I’ve been a boxer, a diplomat, and worse. Now I’m retired and I spend my time observing, my arms resting on the barrier that separates me from the action. And you know what? I’m sad to find so many stories like mine. Without the exotic flourishes, maybe, with skin tones more common in these latitudes, but they’re still there. The same hearts mixed up in the same stuff, one generation after another. It’s incredible.”

He took a long drink, then made a strange noise, as though satiated.

“Another round?”

“I can’t, really. Look how my hand is trembling, I’m scared to death.”

“I understand. But it’s silly to worry. When you go up you’ll probably find her sleeping.”

“No, no, Helen’s not like that, she doesn’t let things pass and settle down, she’s not one to believe in the curative powers of a new day. She’ll be awake, waiting for me, because she knows I’m not going back to Barcelona and I’m not going to sleep next to the pool. I’m sure she’s prepared something special for me, so this will be an unforgettable night.”

I got up, disturbed by the gin and the conversation. I shook Mabus’s hand, and he wished me luck. My words may seem theatrical, but the proof I wasn’t acting was the clot of worry climbing up my throat. That clot and I were old friends. The first time it made its presence known, I was on my way home to Barcelona after attending a meeting in Madrid with the Passgard people. I was checking my suitcase when I heard the beep notifying me of a text message — mobile phones were new then, and Helen had quickly gotten used to having me available at all times. But I didn’t even know where the phone was. I patted down my coat pockets while they printed my boarding pass. I asked about the gate and it chimed again; I liked the idea of storing up several messages to distract me on the plane. When I reached security I took off my watch, my belt, took my keys out of my pocket, and I saw eleven missed calls from Helen, read her messages in reverse order:

WHERE ARE YOU?

WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER?

CAN I CALL YOU?

I called her at home and on her mobile, but she didn’t answer. I wandered past the shops in the terminal. A beam of incandescent light flashed over the enormous windows from one end to the other, tracing the outline of the mountains. I watched as an enormous jet landed, the concentrated heat forming waves in the air.

My concern about Helen’s calls was still only skin-deep, and underneath swam more unpleasant currents: in an hour we would reengage with our day-to-day problems, which could be summed up by saying that Helen was switching off. She didn’t cook, she didn’t do laundry, she didn’t go out to parties with me. We didn’t laugh anymore, she just stayed on the sofa with the TV on. Her interest in working had diminished, and there’d even been a couple of afternoons when I jumped up to take her pulse, to be sure she was still breathing. I know that there are guys who can be satisfied alongside people who sit there and don’t do anything, but I am not one of them.

I let the pregnant women pass me, then two cripples, the children, a bunch of miscreants in ties. I let a band of Peruvians with their malicious little eyes go by (I didn’t trust them even if they had paid for their tickets — we only get the worst specimens here). I let a handful of girls cut from the same vigorexic cloth go past, I let by old men and women who still seemed to me ambassadors from a distant planet, and a Chinese man. I like the Chinese. You’ll never hear me say a hostile word about a Chinaman. And when it was my turn, I realized my ticket wasn’t numbered, I had to sit near the wing. My ears started hurting before we took off, but at least I got a window.

The attendant reminded us that it was “advisable” to turn off our mobile phones on the plane. A period of nicotine-phobia was bearing down on us then, but I managed to get in a few puffs in the bathroom before the flight. It wasn’t yet night when the plane entered its most absurd phase, when that vast metal machine made to cross the heavens starts moving across the runway on baby-buggy wheels. The plane taxied for a while, and at every turn the windows offered a new perspective on the same paved landscape. When I finally remembered to turn off the phone, I saw I had five new messages:

WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME, WHEN?

I’M NOT FEELING SO GOOD.

I DON’T.

TELL ME WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHO ARE YOU WITH?

WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING?

Her mobile wouldn’t let me leave her a goddamn message, and the home line sounded like someone had pulled out the cables at their roots. But there was no point starting to fret then — the pressure in my ears was telling me that if I looked out the window I’d see how, second by second, the distance between the plane and the ground was widening, everything taking on the dimensions of an animated miniature. The plane made a splendid turn in the air that enveloped its body like a cushion. I saw the airport in perspective, and two roads making their way among fields dotted with pom-poms of vegetation that seemed to be growing there out of pity.

I only started to get really worried when I cast my mind back to one of our Madrid afternoons spent exploring the possibilities of the aroused body. Bicente must have lent us his apartment, I can’t find any other explanation for the fluffy, Bordeaux-colored cushions on which Helen was reclining while her tongue peeked between her lips like a citrus peel balancing on the edge of a glass. She seemed about to start laughing, but instead she gave a kind of sigh, as if to dislodge something caught in her throat. She started to sway forward and back, onto the cushions, faster and faster. I was afraid she’d end up cracking her skull open, but after a while she lay still, like a giant doll, her hair disheveled, savoring the vertigo with her eyes closed.

“I’m crazy.”

“Crazy from love?”

She slid her fingers along my torso, little insect antennae that got tangled in hairs that all too soon would turn gray. And while I felt like a hand was twisting uneasily in my guts, her hand, of flesh and blood, slid down my belly until I felt a pressure on my testicles.

“No, no. No!”

“Crazy from pleasure?”

“Cold.”

“Crazy from happiness?”

“Don’t be a fool, you have one try left.”

It started to hurt a little. I was caressing her throat with my open hand. Helen liked to feel my energy right where, if she’d been a man, her Adam’s apple would have stuck out. I felt the passage of saliva, felt her pulse, so it wasn’t a loose grip. Helen’s eyes were challenging when they opened, her expression shifted from playful to defiant to annoyed at discovering who was the stronger, then to impatience to sensuousness to trust to distrust to tenderness. I’m certain that my own pupils flashing in the aqueous white showed only the jubilation of being in love. She let go of my balls before I started to press in earnest.

“Crazy like an American in Europe?”

“Don’t be an idiot, John. Crazy from being crazy. Scary crazy. Crazy for real.”

I came out of that memory with the feeling I was moving through a tunnel that lasts longer than expected. We left behind a bank of clouds, purplish like cardinals. I prefer to travel at night; I like it when you can see a city’s luminous skeleton among the broad sheets of shadows. I think it does me good when I can reassure myself that all that urban agitation — the racket of people getting on and off buses, the traffic, the array of dreams, plans and goals growing in all those heads — all of it, at a certain distance, gets simplified into a cold radiance.

I let the most impatient passengers rush for the exit. I turned on my mobile, and against all odds the home phone rang: two, five, six rings. I tried again on the steps of the plane, the runway crowded with carts stuffed with suitcases. The bells sounded in the void; any one of them could overcome the distance and connect me to my wife. When I heard the familiar sound of her picking up, I felt for the first time the slimy mass of fear rising in my gullet.

“When are you coming home?”

“Helen…”

“When?”

“Are you all right?”

“No. I’m not. When?”

“I’m going to pick up my suitcase and catch a taxi. I’d say half an hour.”

“Don’t be long, please don’t be long.”

“No, of course not, but—”

“Don’t be long, I don’t feel well, I’m not doing so good. And bring water, there’s no water left. I’m thirsty. Don’t be late.”

I must have brought her up a bottle of water, but instead of giving me an explanation Helen chose to lie down on the sofa and pour herself something stronger. It was enough just to have me near, she didn’t even feel the urge to touch me. She wanted me there just in case, a living air bag. Nothing new, that was the sound track of our lives. I decided to push her that night, not only because she started lurching from one armrest to the other as if she couldn’t hold her head up anymore. The urgency in her messages had bothered me, the pitiful tone of her voice floating in the void through the phone. I didn’t let her twist my arm, I demanded a sensible explanation for her depressed energy, her recent spiritual lassitude. Unfounded crankiness is terrifying, you can’t argue against something inchoate — I needed something solid to confront. It wasn’t meant to be, though. While I was looking for her nightgown she flopped into bed. I kept at it for the next week (I delayed dinner, stamped down the hallway so she couldn’t sleep), until finally her adversary emerged from her mind to enter the real world and name the one responsible for all that mental chaos and indolence.

“You’re a good person, John, you don’t know what evil is like. You haven’t seen it, you don’t know how it smells.”

“That’s why I wanted to meet your parents, John, to know if I could count on you when he reappeared. But your father was good, you mother has grown old, and your sister is a pathetic woman, a fat, sad woman.”

“Now I know you’re not going to save me, that Barcelona isn’t far enough away, that this marriage isn’t going to protect me.”

“Poor John, poor John, my dear John, we’re going to suffer a lot if you don’t leave me. You’re going to suffer.”

“My father, my daddy has come back, and he wants me dead.”

It was one thing to be sick of interrogating her, and quite another for me to swallow that nonsense, which at best promised domestic drama and at worst a bit of criminality. My family was a disaster, agreed, but an honorable one. Skirting adultery, Dad had managed to maintain a fairly civilized arrangement with Mother. I was living with Helen because of a series of random events that in no way made me responsible for the grotesque complications starting to foment in Unfathomable America. I hadn’t married her past! To calm myself down I repeated like a mantra that Helen’s Daddy and mother (whose name I don’t even remember, so you can see how much attention I paid her) were an ocean and several seas away. They couldn’t stick their noses into our lives.

Helen’s grandstanding was all about how, by moving away from her splendid homeland (Fuokville, land of Lewis and Clark) to marry me, she’d abandoned (abandoned!) her family. All the Thrushes were left bottled up (bottled up!) in the past, adrift and at the mercy of the waves. Of course, the standout word of Helen’s private journal (which, when she left the apartment, I read with the justifiable goal of learning more about her) was “special”; when she extrapolated about herself, the girl could pass for an optimist. She was still joined to Daddy Rupert by flesh-and-blood ties, and when those ties took it upon themselves to transmit an electric charge to her, my Helen threw herself into transatlantic conversations that didn’t exactly match his supposed indifference. Not to mention how they cut from my bank account (the phone expenses never went to the joint account we opened, I never knew why) another slice of the inheritance I was counting on. Not to mention the three boxes (“hidden” under our bed) where she kept half a set of baby teeth (a barbaric American custom), her third poem to Daddy (Thank you, daddy/your smile cheers me/your words nurture me/your beard caresses me/Thank you, daddy), three Valentine’s Day cards (from three different admirers), an herbarium of romantic petals, and her first running shoes mended with blue thread. As she “distanced” herself from her parents, Helen was putting space between her senses and the school walls, the country dances, the array of cakes and pastries that would later flow in fatty rivers to settle on her hips, the family nicknames whose existence she acknowledged only when she was drunk, the Christmas dinners with Christmas silverware and Christmas tablecloths, the endless reruns of the same anecdotes about cousins and aunts and neighbors, the cavalcade of births, baptisms, weddings, and funerals whose respective rites comprised the main public entertainment modest people offer one another. Plus the visits to Glacier National Park, the preachers’ sermons on local radio, the chewing gum, the regional baseball leagues, the kids’ covetous way of fornicating after high school graduation, the deep-seated feminine rivalries, the shame with which people received the news of another tourist decapitated by a bear. The chain of reliable ingredients you can never be entirely weaned off and that, if you’re not careful, will end up compacted into a vital paste that is the only dish you spoon into your mouth your whole life long. At the end of the day, only frigid girls and handicapped people choose to stay and live in the town they’re born in.

What Helen told me while she sat there on the sofa with her legs crossed Indian-style; what she said while in her robe in front of the half-open refrigerator door, waiting for her hand to steady so she could finally pour some milk into her cup; what I could make out while she was tossing and turning on the sheets (and my eye captured at every half-turn the brand on the elastic in the area under her buttocks: a furrow in the flesh less than a centimeter deep); what I gleaned and thought I understood all led to the same short conclusion:

“I spent my childhood trying to please him.”

Sipping vegetable juice, convinced that concoction would cleanse the alcohol from her blood, Helen told me that as a child she’d willed herself to grow up pretty so she wouldn’t disappoint him. She told me how she would seize his arms and shout, “I love you, I love you,” and that it would have been enough simply to hear a “me too,” an “of course,” a “ditto”—some echo of approval. She told me she offered herself like a gift, that she sang and drew just to gladden one of Rupert’s hours. As a teenager she tormented herself about her figure so she would be a good jumper, to win a modicum of paternal respect. She never did.

All in all it took me a couple of hours even to understand that the Rupert she was talking about, so desperate to engender a son, was her Daddy, her father (who her grandfather baptized with the name Rudolf — the first Thrush to receive a sacrament on American soil — in the white church planted out on the prairie, in a baptismal font that was the town’s artistic pride and joy). And that baby would grow into the expectant father who, overcome, peered at the ultrasound (whose fluorescent undulations reminded him of the granulated images in UFO documentaries) where the suspended boiling mass of his daughter was growing embryonic lungs, extremities, a stomach surrounded by arteries. The man who observed his wife and was moved when he superimposed the familiar face smiling at him onto that new creature on the inside of the belly’s wall, mutating to the beat of a plan engraved in the DNA he bequeathed her the moment he spilled his seed in her mother. I didn’t ask her how that memory was so clear in her mind. With one look, Helen made it very obvious that if I started to question those Montana-forged myths, she might just claw my eyes out.

Nor did it help that, on entering the world, Helen pushed her mother’s ovaries out ahead of her. Or she tore up the placenta — what do I know? — some unpleasantness that ruins the oven. Covered in mucous and free of ideas, Helen was clearly innocent, but from that first moment on, Rupert saw her as one of those little meteorites that hit the Earth trailing a somber wake of sterility behind them.

“To Daddy, I will always be the murderer of my future brothers.”

I tried to defuse her past, and told her that she’d have the opposite problem with me, since I would rather have a girl. She recoiled. It was like I’d squirted a drop of lemon onto one of those half-alive slimy things that spend their dismal existence hidden inside a shell. Then she started to slap me with open palms, and when she finished her eyes were dry but shot through with red. I learned that I couldn’t mix the central episodes of her family saga with the erotic interlude she’d chosen to enjoy in Barcelona. The epicenter of her existence was the interminable dispute with Rupert; what she and I had was a vicarious romance. However good a time she may have been having in that temperate city of serene skies, the only thing Helen read in the recap of her life was that she had always lost.

You’re going to laugh, of course you’ll laugh, but for months I’d believed that I had seduced her; I’d stopped in front of shop-windows and looked at those price tags as if they were meaningless numbers, signs for idiots blind to life’s most intense pleasures: to win an argument, to possess a woman. My thoughts had been fuzzy. I’d felt like a bull with its snout smeared triumphantly with mud, but the eyes of the cows, the lionesses — of the subhuman female of your choosing — always waver between surrender and an instinctive shine of pride. Anyway, there’s really nothing you can compare to Helen’s scintillating and avaricious eyes, those little fragments that moved aside so my big body could take its place in the center of their enigmatic circles and I could play the part of the male companion she’d been ruminating on ever since she got her first period. It was a role that had fallen to me randomly, and not through conquest as my vanity had led me to fantasize.

But, who was this Rupert? Who was the man behind the myth? Who was Rudolf Thrush III? Daddy’s story went like this: the son of a communist émigré from Hamburg, he had received the baton passed by his father after a life dedicated to survival, one that had been the lever for raising a prosperous business (in a humble sense of the word). For years he’d been his father’s only employee (his brother Beryl enlisted in the Marines, and once they considered him crazy enough they sent him back to Montana with a certificate and a pension that helped cover the costs of the twenty years he’d spend building model planes). Rupert passed the decades delivering milk, cheese, and yogurt in a van that he never took to the mechanic. He changed its tires and shined its hood with the very same hands that delivered date and walnut cakes, that avidly dished out the goulash that year by year lost its Central European nuances until it was diluted in the genus of common savory stews. At the wheel of that van, Rupert drove the Thrushes into the comfortable territory of the middle class.

This was the father, with a soft and dark mustache, to whom age had added varicose veins and bluish spots in his left eye, iridescent like bruises. An average man, a prejudiced, sixty-something man. You need a fair amount of invisible misery to turn him into some sadistic creature; it’ll make you dizzy just thinking about it. But the father and the father’s contempt made up the precursor that, fattened by distance and imagination, assailed Helen and made her tremble until the color left her face. This was the beast that devoured our best hours, until the days collapsed in upon themselves.

I considered a possibility that was more humiliating for me yet more favorable to both of us. Maybe her despondence and the story of the sinister father were just a smoke screen to hide the simple, conventional explanation: a lover. I felt better prepared to handle a splendid cuckolding than the delights of family trauma. I promised myself that I would welcome adultery like an anniversary gift. If only Helen’s nervous state would turn out to be the toll taken by hiding the fact that she went to bed naked with a gentleman who wasn’t me: that they sent each other idiotic messages, that they fondled each other, that he stuck his index finger into her nostril (who knows what got it up for the filthy pig).

I made a fool of myself going through her papers, inspecting her call history, going over café receipts, even following her in the street! I imagined a rough composite: a kind of casual provincial, some guy from Solsona or Reus — places where it’d take you two weeks to notice if a virus wiped out the entire population — with a shiny, wet cleft lip (there’s something maternal about women who experiment with the weird side of masculinity — you know, dwarves, three-hundred-pound lard-asses, redheads). And don’t think I ruled out successive infidelities: a series of flings, Ethiopian-style. I’d have given her a hug. And I would have forgiven her immediately if she’d come to me and confessed that her abject state was because, before landing in Europe, she’d given birth to an illegitimate child outside the five-city radius in the United States where the law put up real obstacles to polygamy. Still, she managed to hide Jackson from me for another six months.

Once we were watching a nature program, and I waited for her to get bored with hunting and fishing and fall asleep before I started fondling her; this time, I was interested only in the asexual function of her breasts. But Helen wasn’t showing any gestational signs, and I dismissed the idea of a phantom pregnancy. I didn’t have the skill I do now when it comes to the Internet, and I had to make do with the Larousse Medical Dictionary. I remember molar inspections, and that one night I delicately separated her toes to rule out the possibility that she was growing fins. It may seem excessive, but it was very important to me to be sure that the emotional darkness squeezing Helen’s spirits was temporary, that it wouldn’t be impossible for me to pull her out of that state. The wretched reason couldn’t be rooted that deep in the past. I needed to convince myself that we weren’t going to live like a couple of stinking rags from then on just because Rupert had imagined his old age would be spent with a little Mike, John, or Brad beside him (didn’t matter, just someone who could pee standing up), watching baseball on TV, hunting butterflies, or whatever it is that macho Montana men do.

When she started to go really downhill, I bought a couple of serious books on depression, and it felt as if I were rolling up my sleeves to take on a physical task: force open a door, carry furniture up the stairs, push a car until the motor starts. I faced Helen’s sadness the same way I had overcome my juvenile problems: by injecting the heart with a shock of adrenaline. Of course, Daddy Rupert wasn’t a window or a motor, nor could I grab him by the wrist or wring his neck. He was little more than a slippery impression, and we were defenseless before him.

Enlisting the same passion with which I’d turned to the classic repertoire of the jealous and paranoid husband, I launched her into rounds of appointments with psychiatrists I paid to find a physical cause for that rampant anxiety. I know no one who passed her on the street and saw the rack on her would believe me, but the truth is that during that time the only part of Helen that interested me was her brain: the very marrow of our problems.

Last Thursday at Pedro’s apartment I found a BBC documentary about some neurologists who injected a chemical dye into a brain and could trace the movement of a thought. When the cycle of reason is short and obsessive, it’s spectacular — you know, those people so terrified by germs they need to wash their hands every three minutes. You can see the electrical tracks of the ideas biting their own tail; it reminded me of a carousel. Back then, though, they just stuck Helen into a sarcophagus and irradiated her head until they had a blueprint of her brain. Dr. Fronkonstine showed us some small dark spots: weak material, areas that didn’t get enough minerals, something like that. It was amazing to think that all our malaise could depend on those shady areas moving across the dunes of cerebral material like clouds’ shadows. But I wasn’t about to buy any lithium or mercury tablets. I’d already seen what they could do when we set them loose in Mother’s brain.

“Other than that, there is no lesion. You can always go to a psychologist; they’re the best-equipped healers of the soul — we’ve got them more controlled than any other kind of shaman.”

Healthy atoms, clean molecules, robust fibers. In the taxi I realized that a smile was showing through Helen’s usual sad rictus, as if in the end she were happy not to have to dilute Daddy’s black influence within a broader scheme of neural deterioration. She seemed pleased to keep the face-off going.

Rupert was hoping for a son and he got a daughter, a girl he had not wished for with all his heart — that was it? Are we really so simple, so predictable? None of the people who had known me six years earlier (living it up on the southern coast, celebrating the degree that qualified me to direct the businesses Dad started and that, as I boasted to my friends back then, pretty much ran themselves) would have believed that some girl born five thousand miles away was going to stick me with her family mess and impose a lifestyle on me that consisted of growing old next to a head case. Of course, Helen denied that her torment would last long: it would be over once Daddy was “no longer alive.” The sinister echoes of that decree held me obliquely responsible that Rupert hadn’t kicked the bucket yet. What did my sweet love expect me to do? Buy a plane ticket and drive along back roads to Fuokville, where I’d stab my father-in-law with a marble-handled letter opener? If a continent of salt water wasn’t enough to cauterize her wounds, I didn’t believe putting the planet of the dead between the two of them would work either. That imbroglio was the most interesting part of her past, it was stuck to her, so hot you couldn’t separate it without pulling off her whole skin. Freud rules because he lets you interpret your pathetic sex life as if it were some extraordinary entanglement, so complicated and steamy. Really though, it should be against the law to dump all that shit on yourself.

Our life started to burn out before our eyes. She lost interest in making love, and tried to keep me satisfied with an early-morning oral offensive. And I won’t deny it, that dawn exercise was a powerful reason to stick around. I must be true to my priorities, they’re certainly more loyal than people, they won’t just up and leave you overnight. It filled me with tender pride that my physical self, my precious soma, still responded to the initial attack and to the delicate (and mortifying) slow motion that followed, and which, after an early period when I employed any trick I could to keep her there another half-minute, Helen had come to dominate with icy mastery. But even when blurred by waves of oxytocin, my mind would have been grateful for any hesitation, an impulse to kiss, an attack of modesty, an embrace. Blow jobs are overrated: if they’re dragged out for too long there’s something decidedly gay in the passivity you’re reduced to. Helen served me too many portions of the same dish: a juvenile recipe, glazed in a sickly sweet sauce. She no longer had the will to stew us with an adult palate in mind. I guess some emotion was a lot to ask for; she was already making such an effort. Plus, the pills (which she started taking on the sly) were like a shovel that can’t distinguish the quality of the earth it digs up: as they heaved the pain from her mind, they also yanked the roots of desire from her body. To go to bed seriously with a man, a woman has to feel complete. She can’t have parts of her brain asleep.

Helen was a woman who had to make an effort to read headlines to the end, but one day she asked me to go with her to the bookstore, where she stocked up on esoteric tomes, trying out self-help, willpower-building, family horoscopes. She got interested in a certain therapist named Jovanotti, who advised using one’s bodily fluids to draw pictures of all one’s relatives in order to overcome the coercive behaviors that we carry (according to him) fossilized in our chests. (And how was I to help her — me, who wanted only for my father to return, so I could ask his advice again, feel the touch of his hand?) She experimented with a spiritualist diet, and I was forced to eat out because that slop was so vile. Helen switched from one approach to the next without seeing any one method through to its end. Nor did it seem that delving deeper into “say yes” or chromotherapy was really going to improve our situation.

Helen barely mentioned what she hoped to find in those books that she left open like bored crows, their spines creased end to end with a thick wrinkle. But then I’d see her tuck her hair behind her ears (have I mentioned that she was — she is — left-handed?) and I’d watch, motionless and spellbound, as the locks fell loose again one by one to form a new fringe. When I looked at all that beauty polluted by the pills, I knew that Helen was searching for a bit of hope. I don’t know how things work for horses or beavers but when it comes to humans, as long as you still have words there’s always some hope left. The tongue passes over the lips and the words leave behind a residue of energy. That’s the vital compensation for using them, that’s the trick — keep ideas active, shake up your thoughts. Helen would have gotten some comfort just reading aloud the label on the pasta sauce.

Do you have any idea how many women carry magic stones around, spread potions over their bodies to prevent aging, monitor the movements of the stars to fit the small events of their lives into some kind of cosmic causality? How many believe that they are watched over by a friendly, superhuman presence? That the universe, the interminable mass that spreads out and folds in on itself, peppered with incandescent bodies, insensate material, and stardust, is conspiring in their favor? There are no reliable statistics, but let’s say one in every three women in the comfortable, urban West is going to turn to pills (as if there were a world free of suffering folded inside them). Look, I don’t think all of you are bonkers. I tend to think that something isn’t right in women’s brains, that there’s a piece that breaks off from the inner workings of sanity ahead of time, like a built-in obsolescence. One night you lay your head on the pillow, and something cracks inside it and breaks. You get up, frightened, and wait for it to pass, but the day spreads through the streets and afternoon arrives and your fear surges because those gears are still busted. And don’t think I’m just ranting, there’s a physiological basis to this, actually. The hormones you all have floating around in your bodies like invisible medusas don’t sweat out enough of the substance of happiness. Helen’s must have been practically all dried up.

She didn’t like the beach anymore, and walks in the mountains were too much for her. Her dejection on opening her eyes ruled out any plan I might propose. I missed the way alcohol used to have more exhilarating effects on her than a stupor; I missed feeling the contractions of her body when I grabbed her neck with the firm sweetness of my desire. I was bored, I was imprisoned in a life that wasn’t for me. Our fights stopped seeming like two splendid currents of energy that tripled their force on meeting. Helen’s dazed voice conveyed only serial complaints:

“I want to leave Barcelona.”

“This apartment is a rip-off.”

“I want to leave, we have to get out.”

“Barcelona, it’s the city’s fault.”

By now “Helen’s situation” was swallowing up our days. I could still corner her verbally, but that’s like using physical strength against a virus, against falling rain. You can’t imagine the patient fortitude weak people have until you’re shackled to one. You can’t understand how they just absorb all warmth, all happiness, all the moments that beg to be enjoyed with all your heart. The only part of the day I could enjoy was its first minutes, when Helen amassed heat under the sheets, a little animal dirty with sleep, and I took the chance to wrap her in embraces salvaged from our best times together. What can you do when someone sinks so deeply into despondence? Even if you stick your arm into the slippery hollow after them, there’s no guarantee you’ll get it out whole again, the way it was before. How do they remember their former lives in that doleful state? I like to think they still keep some sense of their old relationships, even if the view is as poor as when we look out at the spinning galaxy from Earth: a swarm of points blazing in space.

I’d get up and make myself a coffee. The water for the shower would heat up and I could hear the apartment’s circulation stirring, its metallic veins, pipes, and conduits. I’d shower fearfully, brush my teeth naked and terrified, waiting for Helen’s consciousness to turn on and for the black juices to reconfigure the awareness of her weaknesses: how far she still had to go to get better, the man she lived with, and how little she could expect from him. In the mirror I saw that the discreet veins that irrigated my cheeks had spilled into rosacea. I swear I could hear the sheets squealing when Helen moved. My hands trembled, I couldn’t take three steps without feeling that bitter mass of anxiety climbing up my esophagus.

“John.”

And it could be anything.

I didn’t even seriously think about taking a lover. Outside in the street the salacious parade of pleasing shapes continued, and what happened happened, but I won’t even go so far as to call it an incident. Let’s just say that she had three kids and ten years on me, and an opening so wet I could barely feel anything. Really, the thing was an arrangement between her and her fluids. I chose her because it had been years since I’d kissed a woman that dark. She didn’t take off her bra, and her face barely registered any pleasure. These things happen, but I didn’t feel I had the strength to initiate a real entanglement: the pretending, the duplicity, the phone calls and agreements, the emotional roller coasters, my husband, your wife, the ebb and flow of everyday life, the ebb and flow of feelings about the poor cuckolds, united without knowing each other by an intangible lubricious thread….To promise loyalty to a person with whom you bake yourself in pleasure with a sauce of betrayal, to feel second fiddle and to feel special, indispensable and a nuisance, to go over your e-mail, erase the text messages, jump every time the doorbell rings, provide explanations and hold back information in both directions, evaluate the long-term value of the new interest, rate the worth of what remains of a life together, reach stupid compromises with yourself, with two sets of emotions, survive that instant when you’d get rid of both of them, let the apex of sentimentality pass when you convince yourself that there really is a magical combination of words that would allow both love stories to flourish and be celebrated and welcomed under the blue and indifferent skies, that the two poor women could meet and learn to respect each other. I don’t have the makings of a double agent: my fibs only grow in soils of spontaneity. There must have been a mistake about my date of birth because if anyone is not a Gemini, it’s me. I’m not made for a double life.

And don’t think my heart’s wearing some kind of hair shirt (it’s just a weak lump, a mass in need of coddling). I admire down to my bones the thousands who, though they can’t say “hi” on a stage without their voices strangling into a falsetto, still manage to weave complex webs of deceit around themselves. They dupe the women and men who know them best in the world, and they happily stroll through their half-paid-off houses clutching a time bomb. What men! What women! It’s not a moral question, I follow my desire wherever it leads — frustration isn’t my style. It’s just that we inveterate monogamists don’t find it appealing to screw around with substitutes. The girls we choose are the ones we desire most.

And since Dad let slip once that battles against women are the only ones you can win by fleeing, when things got really bad (when I was standing paralyzed, washed by the cadaverous light from the fridge, convinced that if today she got the urge to make something to eat she would serve me a soup chock-full of hair), I left the apartment. I would kiss her good morning, and before she was up I’d be down in Barceloneta. The beach’s soft colors distracted me, the crests of sand and the white movement of the water. I’d just sit there. It scared me to live like a piece of damp wood, now unable to burn. The sea’s skin stretched to the horizon, a thickly drawn line. Beyond it, my imagination had me visualize that immense mass of water folding like a pliant cloth, to fall in a cascade toward the sidereal void, an optic trick that exists only on the stage of human vision. It’s almost funny to think how these messy years will be the only experience we’ll ever have of the universe. It really is a fine notion, enough to make you die laughing.

To keep myself entertained until night fell, I’d wander the streets, Casp and Ausiàs March. I felt calmed by that stretch between office closing-time and the hour the night owls emerge, an indeterminate period that separates two species with different nutritional needs. Those discreet hours give the sky a little privacy so it can finish its chromatic transformation and open its silvered eye. I’ll never tire of watching as the streetlights start to come on down an avenue, each absorbing its small portion of shadow.

On a Sunday I could cover several blocks without meeting anyone face-to-face, until I’d see the first group inside the cube of light in a bar, sipping their drinks and smoking. I had only enough energy to go into a dairy shop and order a glass of thick horchata; I knew one that closed late, and from inside you could watch the cable car over the docks, the cabins swaying in space like boxy metaphors for so many fragile and wandering souls.

But rarely did I dare return home later than seven. I’d go up to the apartment weighed down with paper towels, tins of food, margarine, fabric softener, and pasteurized milk. I’d pray a freestyle prayer that she would be asleep and I could save myself another sleepless night full of sobbing, rage, and reproaches. If I didn’t find her in the living room, if she didn’t respond to my first words, my heart would leap in my chest and start beating in my gullet. I was tormented by the fear of finding Helen’s corpse. By now I know that in the suburbs, in the rich neighborhoods, in countless matchbox apartments, there are hundreds of husbands ravaged by complicated emotions, but that year I was terrified of discovering I was the kind of man whose loved ones kill themselves; I’d filled my quota with Dad. I didn’t want to lose any more innocence (not that I really believe in God, but if one of his saints surprises me and is there to receive me in the hereafter, what other defense could I offer against my file of sins — laziness, mistakes, complacency, ignored calls for help — beyond a fistful of fresh innocence?). Most of the time Helen was waiting for me with part of her body outside the sheets, a trunk rooted to a dirt floor. But the thoughts that she fed on that sap could only bloom into infected flowers. She reproached me, insulted me. Sometimes in the middle of an argument a trace of reciprocal affection would tremble in her eyes, and she’d briefly remember that these scenes were the result of a mistaken calculation. I’m afraid that what Helen could read in my eyes was the suspicion that we’d already consumed the generosity we would need if we were ever to recover, that the last particles of mutual tolerance were gone. If she was asleep when I got home, I let myself be calmed by the sound of the refrigerator’s little motor as it worked to conserve the nutrients in our collection of animal cadavers. I barely ate — I was afraid she would poison me with mushrooms, mix crushed glass into the ice, stir bleach into the soup. I really believed she was capable of murdering me.

These are the thoughts of a young man unexpectedly trapped by the pressure of life’s complications. Sometimes (for the past five minutes now) I wonder (in a shamefully rhetorical manner) how I would have reacted if, of my two wives, you’d been the one to fall into that depression. The difference (and this should come as a surprise) is that when I tried to put myself in Helen’s head, I was surrounded by darkness. And this isn’t about gender difference. It leaves me in stitches every time they congratulate your brother on his female characters — he doesn’t deserve it. I, too, am a student of the female soul! Move in with a woman, observe her with your eyes wide open, with your senses bared, and soon you’ll feel that you share nerves, grow common organs, and your spoken identities melt into a common dialect. My brain sprouted feminine bits, and Helen’s was more full of testosterone than she was willing to admit when she wrapped herself in the feminist flag. No, what stopped me making sense of Helen’s worries wasn’t that the estrogen grew tits on her and hung some scraps on me; we were separated by an ocean, the culture of a foreign continent. It would be ten years before I matured into the man you met and fell in love with (because you did fall in love). You can’t even begin to compare the depth of those two relationships.

If I ever feel I was closer to Helen than to you, it’s not because of the sex. (How tempted I am to say that it was, just to piss you off. But I’m not so small-minded, yet, to deny that in spite of your affectations, our sex life was so good it terrifies me to think about a life without the body animated by your character.) It had more to do with the specifics of my relationship with her, so different from the one that joined (that joins) me to you. There you have it, it’s absurd to have gotten married twice and twice squandered what mattered to me most: my own home. The poisonous effects of this calamity on my well-being cannot be calculated. But I have no regrets (though some days I do nothing but regret). The priests taught us rules for survival, but we aren’t here to survive, we’re here to live, and these are the troubles that overcome a person when he forges ahead with his whole body engaged, his entire head and that skein of nerves that, if a forensic doctor were ever to entertain himself by unwinding it, would be long enough to lay a tightrope from Barcelona to Morocco. More life! I ask it of the deaf gods, the vacant heavens, indifferent Mother Nature: eternal life. But the only answer comes from a tree blackened like a mummified finger pointing to a hole in the earth, a niche in the wall, an incinerating oven. Don’t go believing that life’s journey lasts that long, either. It’s not worth applying for a mortgage, drooling over a job, it’s only wasted energy. I don’t think I ever told you (you’ll see why) that when Dad died I convinced myself that when I circled his carcass, what I was really doing was soaking up the leftover time he was no longer going to use, so I would live to be a hundred and twenty. Even if it had worked, it would still be too little. Let some other man regret his divorces, his weddings, his fights, kisses, greed, naiveté, and ambition. Don’t expect me to join the whiners, I don’t plan to disown my emotional mistakes. At least when I end up alone in the house (in some house), I can while away the time weighing them up against each other.

What separated me from you was something too shapeless and slippery to understand. I intuited its size the way an insect’s eyes must take in the impression of a spatter of blue and oily paint, unable to situate it within the frame of a canvas that is too big to comprehend. Even so, while recognizing that my mind lacked the openness to understand the paths you trod, I haven’t lost hope I will change and develop the capacity to appreciate you. What separated me from Helen was small (two seconds and I could run my eyes across it) and well defined: a cold, smooth stone made of her basest emotions, hardened by incomprehension and distance. I never learned to soften it, I was unable to pry it open; it was as alien to me as the rest of the mineral kingdom.

If what I had with Helen blew up, it was because I couldn’t find the way to defuse the time bomb Daddy had planted in her brain. In schmaltzy terms: my love wasn’t strong enough to pull her from those cold waters that are only funny if you keep your distance, because once you see them reflected in the eyes of the person you’re trying to give a decent life to, they turn out to be too dark for a happy heart. I’m not saying that love should be able to raise the dead (although it should), but if it’s not even enough to support someone when the glass of her own existence is cracking, if your love is too weak to keep her from draining out to the point of collapse, then something’s gone wrong.

So I was forced to throw her out.

I mean, if you think about it I had no choice, and it didn’t exactly happen overnight. I don’t remember the precise moment when I stopped acting like a cornered marsupial and got my balls back, but along the way there were moments of tenderness, like the afternoon I went with her to the bookshop, holding the umbrella over her so she wouldn’t get wet. I walked outside but that was only because that combination of incense and sandalwood makes me jittery. Through the window I saw her in that baggy sweater, on tiptoe, reaching up to a high shelf. It’s not that she’d gotten fat, but the cheetah whose movements could flood me with desire had swollen into a sad cat. I had noticed it in older people: a month of worry was enough to dull the vital light that burnishes the skin and softens the hair. They feel depressed, they’re invaded by gray hairs, a rim of fat adheres to their waists, years consumed in days. But you can’t really grasp what it’s like until age takes a swing at the person you live with.

This was during the time all of Helen’s hopes were focused on the Jovanotti method. I did some research on the guy: he’d published two little “metaphysical” novels, and after miraculously escaping with his life after a period of experimenting with acid, he earned some sort of reputation writing books in which he assured girls who were aging like sad houses that they are crucial elements within a grander plan. And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. As if the double t in his name weren’t enough to whisper “charlatan, charlatan,” the only thing that ever emerged from Jovanotti’s mouth in his conferences, workshops, or master classes, was garbage soaked in slime. But I didn’t utter a single malicious word. Matrimonial common sense suggested I overlook that nonsense. My tongue bled from biting it so much.

When you’re deliberating between “to do” and “not to do,” choose to do; if you make a mistake at least you’ll have the experience.

Menstrual blood is sacred: use it to paint your self-portrait.

You’re not loved because you’re beautiful, you are beautiful because you are loved.

Transgress prohibitions and dare to confront the impossible head-on. Then scream for five minutes like a savage animal and you’ll achieve a psychological orgasm.

Grant yourself all the possibilities of being. Change your path as many times as necessary.

Before you die you must bury a firefighter, witness an epileptic fit, and dance with a Chinese prince: this is how you will master your ego.

Helen started the exercises from Jovanotti’s book. She drew her father in burlesque postures (luckily she let me convince her it was just as good to use pencils) and her mother copulating with all manner of creatures. She sewed a doll and stuck pins into it, and she also (I think, because of how it smelled) subjected it to symbolic humiliations with urine. She was so convincing about painting a mural on the white hallway wall that I was willing to turn our apartment into a grotto of cave paintings if only to see her beautiful face again, fatigued from the effort, soft wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, lit by a natural light: almost happy. The fact is she did seem to get better, and when I saw her through the crack in the bathroom door smearing blush on her cheeks, I had to admit that she was coming out of her hole. And although I didn’t like the intense shade she’d chosen for her lips (as if I’d married a discreet, modest bride, and not a woman who just by walking was already beyond the limits of decorum), I let myself be soothed by those frivolous signs with the complacency of a mutt that feels the reassuring touch of a human hand running over its fur.

“What do you want me to do, John?”

I asked her to shower (paying special attention to her hair) and get dressed. I wanted us to go out for dinner, to dance, to drink the way healthy people drink: slowly, letting the intoxication unfurl its solemn ability to soften the world’s revolting disfigurement without isolating you, to enable the embrace of the people you love. I wasn’t asking for anything most couples don’t give each other: to spend a few hours together, support each other with a word, to laugh…even that seemed magnificent to me! I poured a drink, still doubtful we’d make it out the door. The luminous six o’clock air filled the bedroom, and Helen tried on three skirts and two tops before deciding on some green pants that looked like jeans, and the red wool sweater that made her pull her hair back in a high ponytail; she must have had her reasons. I asked her not to wear lipstick: I liked to see her pulpy mouth in its natural shade. If she had gained weight it was only a few kilos; I didn’t care. When she had her usual attitude, I’d find Helen attractive with a baby bootee on her head. I felt tempted to threaten the calm atmosphere of a married couple dressing for dinner and test out that new behind right there. I was stopped only by how sick I was of that convalescent bed. I was all too familiar with the sheets’ wrinkles and folds, the textile expression of the anguish built up in the body that spent entire days between them: a piece of meat run aground.

So I gave up on the idea of touching her, and we took a shiny taxi to none other than Les Corts, where they’d opened a new restaurant with a romantic terrace. It wasn’t the most free-flowing conversation we’d ever had, nor did it help that Helen pushed my hand away just as it found the creases of her inner thigh through the stitching of her pants. A secret reason for bringing her there (other than that it was far enough from home to prevent that lazybones getting up all of a sudden and leaving me there) was that I’d heard wonderful things about the filete ruso, the dish that every Friday for three years an employee served me (I don’t have the heart to write “servant”). I can’t remember now if she went home (somewhere like Honduras), or if she was the one who cracked her skull open in a motorcycle accident and never came back.

I told Helen how filete ruso was a singular creation of industrial Barcelona’s calorific proletarian cooking. A fillet of chicken breast, chopped up finely and soaked in flour and egg. I may have overacted a bit, I’m sure I added something about its flavor as well as its social value, but I was spooked by the way Helen’s gaze was losing its softness. I guess I was hoping that some of my energy could spread to her through my enthusiasm for a delicious chicken dish.

“I don’t want to try that.”

“And wine?”

“No. A glass of water.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“Razor clams.”

And so they brought us a strange pair of dishes: for me, the austere filete ruso with its carapace of fried and shining bread crumbs, crying out for the potato omelette and chorizo sandwich that were its usual companions inside a lunch box. For her, those sticks of mucous, cooked just enough so they wouldn’t spill out of their shells, reeking of stagnant water, of marine salt: the most expensive dish on the menu. I ordered a bottle of Nestlé’s finest Viladrau water to wash it all down.

I was such an idiot that when Helen reached for the ketchup bottle, I took it as a friendly gesture — I thought she was offering it to me. I stopped myself telling her how I detest it when flavors are all reduced to the level of spiced tomato. Then, in horror, I watched Helen’s elbow bending toward her own plate.

“Are you joking? You can’t put ketchup on razor clams.”

“Yes, I can. Just watch me. I like it.”

In a way, it was a masterpiece of condescension, the gesture of contempt with which she dumped enough red gunk to drown a whole family of chicken patties over those delicacies she’d insisted on ordering: a whole period of disenchantment, furious tantrums, and stretches of decayed conversation all coalesced into the image of a healthy woman ruining her food in a chemical delirium. Now I don’t know if I’m referring to the sauce or her brain. She achieved the same effect of obscene defiance as if she’d tried to suck her own big toe. The only difference was that if she’d done that, the waiters would have intervened. As it was, we were going to have to stick it out until the end of a dinner that was destined to become an indelible landmark in the history of our marriage.

“It’s hot.”

And she started taking off clothes until she was in a tank top that recently I’d caught her using as pajamas, perfect for sucking those razor clams like they were shrimp heads and licking the dribbles of processed tomatoes (I can almost convince myself she did it with no evil intent, that she was just confused about what she was eating).

I should have responded by dipping my tie in the coffee (if I’d dunked it in the vintage Viladrau, they would have mistaken my subversive gesture for a fairly pedestrian attempt at removing a stain). Luckily, we left before dessert.

“Pay. I’m cold.”

The filete ruso was roiling in the pit of my stomach, my tongue was turning dry as cardboard under the dome of my palate. I needed a drink; I put Helen into a taxi and kept a set of keys. It was the first time I ever looked at her ass completely devoid of sexual interest, as a mass of glands and sebaceous particles, astutely designed as cushions to protect a fairly disgusting conduit. Nor was the front a lot better, much as you scrubbed it with soap or lily water — oh strange, crazy mammalian love, built into the house of excrement. As a boy, when they first explained to me the technique of human reproduction, I saw clearly that God was a filthy pig. Later on you get used to the genital-excretory mess, but no one is going to convince me that evolution did a great job there — it had thousands of years to find a more elegant design. There’s a lot of laziness around, even the trees repeat the same pattern over and over. And with that idea floating in the delicate shadows of my mind, I ordered my second drink.

I went home calculating the cost of the three taxis, dinner, and drinks, with my tie soaked in Cardhu (I couldn’t resist dunking it). I was overcome by a strange, useless, slightly idiotic feeling: I was offended by the simple passage of time, the gall it had in brushing against us for a mere second, only to move away like a listless residue idly piling up in a past that grew thicker and thicker. I asked the driver to take a spin. Paral-lel was lit by dozens of signs; if I squinted, the lights stretched into shining filaments in the night. I’ve liked that effect since Dad used to drive me around when I was a child (from where to where?). Those days have since emptied out into nothing more than an idea of time: the world was so new, I couldn’t conceive of the earth being so old. I liked the smooth braking at the red lights, the expectant waiting, the feeling of rolling backward before letting out the clutch and accelerating. Through the cold window I saw the needle of the Columbus statue, the sober curve the road traces around Palau de Mar, and the first offices on the port, buildings that hug the ground like insect carcasses. That night, it began to make me furious that among so many vanished memories there were a few that coalesced to become harder and more stable, like monuments tracing the outline of my progress. I told the taxi driver to take us around Montjuïc: along the slope of the botanical garden, past the amusement park Ferris wheel with its cars covered by awnings, through the almost petrified lawns, the esplanade below the cemetery where you can park: a drive-in movie from where they project the city’s shining shell. But a sentimental memory overtook me then: I’m walking and holding Dad’s hand, I don’t know in what country, though we’d spent all afternoon in the desert. The dunes were all right, but in the end they bored me. We went into a tent and I said I didn’t want to sleep; I was afraid of the white scorpions, but the plan was to eat dinner and go back outside. The night had transformed the sky into a deep, deep darkness lit by the galaxy’s kiln. When our eyes got used to it we could see stars behind the stars, and more stars behind them, forming dense, luminous groups; a man with a torch helped us identify the constellations and give them names. It was a fascinating map, drawn in strokes of cold fire, but even more so when you realized that the abysses between the motes of shining dust were the condensation of a terrifying expanse. It made me furious that my richest memories, the most secure ones, were mere points of light between which yawned trenches of lost life, and that as hard as I tried to recapture my memories, the void would always prevail.

Helen had left the key in the lock and I couldn’t open the door. The girl who came to open it was wearing her usual ratty T-shirt and some underpants that stimulated only chastity — the kind of creature one only lives under the same roof with in nightmares. Inside, the floor was littered with photographs and papers, spread out deliberately, a spell.

“It’s my fault. I’m not good enough. I’m not. I didn’t even dare to tell you the truth about my entire family.”

I barely gave her a choice. I bought her a ticket straight back to Montana and I threw her out of the house. I said something about a vacation, about how it would do her good to have her family look after her for a while. Neither of us believed it.

I paid for two nights for Helen in the Claris hotel, and the balance of our bank account sank well below the imaginary safety line I had drawn. All my alarm bells started ringing — I had no idea of the series of humiliations that were still to come, which would make me remember even the decline of those days as a period of opulence. Of course, I expected Helen to take it badly. I had calculated that she’d get so depressed her hair would start falling out, that she’d threaten me with slitting her wrists. What took me completely by surprise was that she still had enough energy to terrorize me.

I had to change the lock not only out of fear she would rob me, not just to protect the Miró (Helen was so furious that, rather than taking it with her, I think she would have added a brushstroke using the toilet brush), but because the previous night (after thirty-something calls that went unanswered), she’d threatened to plant drugs in my apartment. And I would have asked her snidely just where she was going to get enough cocaine to fuck up my life, if only she hadn’t been using the same voice as when she yelled at me while tearing up shirts and smashing dishes and burning the armrests, difficult habits that I’ve managed to leave out of the story until now, who knows why. When she used that voice, she was capable of yanking the lymph nodes out of a live camel. And since I’d bought a ticket for the next day to Istanbul, thinking it would do me good to have a change of scenery, I had to call a night locksmith who only accepted my explanations after I showed him the stamped rental contract. Then he started jabbering on so incontinently about the movies that were on and the boom in Korean cinema, I was forced to stop listening to the criminal messages that crazy bitch was sending me from her evil doghouse, where she had forgotten her problems with Daddy shockingly fast. Rejection is a great personal trainer, and Helen was now an enemy in top form.

Although it would have been exciting to stay home in monastic calm, pirating the flicks Muñoz the locksmith told me about, with the phone disconnected, starting at every sound, expecting Helen to begin pounding at the door (do police get involved to defend the husband in domestic arguments?), I decided to go ahead with my plan and leave. Istanbul is cheap, the sun shines, you can drink iced tea, and I had never seen a real mosque up close, in its habitat. But I did something besides visit the Bosphorus and photograph cupolas: I brought with me the new set of keys and the invoice for what that last-minute intervention had cost me. And while my body was swimming at the private beach on Büyükada or eating dinner on a terrace overlooking a stream of detritus borne along on a soft current, the most turbulent part of my soul was feeling envy toward this society that still protected women from their own initiative. Bicycles whizzed past, Polish vans, orange carts, crippled street vendors, almost every one of them crazy to get into the EU. I felt sorry for all those Orhans and Omars (did you know they’re not even Arabs?) whose eyes jumped out of their heads when some little European beauty went by, squeezed into linen showing every line of her behind. They were ignorant of the costs that come with that visual freedom: if the West is unstoppable, well then, Cide Hamete, hold on to your minaret, because you don’t know what’s coming for you.

What can I say? I followed the plotline that best fit my character. You can look for heroes in any movie, in songs on the radio, in books that fill your head with ideas about Fate and personal betterment. Here we’re talking about a guy who couldn’t even visit his own mother once a month — do you really think I’d go see Helen off at the airport? Viewed unsentimentally, that sad good-bye wasn’t going to do either of us any favors. My plan was pretty humane — she could wallow as long as she liked in my selfish macho insensitivity (and forget about the fact that I had supported her for almost three years), but by the time I opened the door to our building, carrying a stupendous hookah and several boxes of apple tea, Helen would already have spent three days gazing out over the electrifying Montana prairies. Those people may be barbaric, but they must get some great sunsets over there.

She couldn’t hide drugs in my apartment, but when I came back I was met at the door by a garbage bag the size of a red kangaroo. It held every dress I had ever given her, mixed with mayonnaise, cans of tuna, dried-up apple cores, gobs of ketchup, rotten vegetables, and more sanitary pads than she could have dirtied on her own in a single month: all of it perfectly equal in its level of filth.

The girl who cleaned the stairwell cost me fifty euros a month, so I put on a white jacket to go and seduce her with a formal complaint that she’d forgotten the bag on the landing. She was the first Russian I’d ever spoken to, a specimen of disconcerting size. I didn’t want to sleep with the help, I was only reawakening the social skills without which a single man is nothing. My pants were tight around the thighs, too much Turkish pastry, too many nerves soothed by steaming portions of junk food — excess weight Natasha wasn’t going to hold against me. It had been three years since I’d folded a handkerchief in the pocket of my jacket.

“A woman left it there this morning. She had the key to the front door.”

So we’d missed each other by only an hour or two. I calculated what it was going to cost me to convince the other tenants to change the lock on the front door. If it weren’t for the closed-circuit camera, I would have broken it myself.

“She gave me this for you.”

And with Chechen cunning she slid me an envelope from which peeked, intact, Helen’s plane ticket. I went into the apartment and flopped down on the sofa without unpacking my bags. I listened to the messages Helen had left on the answering machine: one of those cassettes that dragged the tape as if time itself were turning inside it. How could a woman incapable of going out into the street alone manage to find a room (and pay for it!) in the Mediterranean’s most expensive city?

Of course, I also thought about “my folks.” But even with her brain turned to mush, my mother wouldn’t have let Helen take the fabulous elevator up to the living room alone, and Señora Popo had been trying to mend fences with me for months: it’s one thing to torment a brother, but quite another to side with an in-law.

The explanation was ridiculous and efficient, like life itself. In vaudeville there is always the useful dunce, the guy who opens the door at the wrong time to stop the action tiring, hired so the audience stays glued to their seats. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have already guessed that the willing dupe of this interlude could only be Bicente (did you really think I’d shine the spotlight on him only to let him sink back into the shadows?). Bicente needed to regroup after the end of his marriage to a posh little chick who’d come into the world to smooth her hair and make demands, and who’d ended up with their apartment in Madrid. So Bicente allowed himself a period of calm to “find himself again” in the Catalan paradise of warm weather and multicolored girls. He’d spent half a week in the “Ciudad Condal,” as he called it in the unmistakable provincial-capital way of the madrileños (tender little partridges that they are, lost in this lair of hyenas). And after seeing all the famous buildings and getting tired of beauty at the exhibitions and looking out over the bobbing sea, he decided to strike up our friendship again, which he remembered with alarming warmth.

They must have bumped into each other in the doorway of my apartment. Or maybe someone had given him Helen’s number and, spurned as she was, she threw herself into his arms like a castaway who, with a storm threatening overhead, latches onto a slimy life buoy. I hope you’re happy with that analogy, because I can come up with less flattering ones. Bicente took her to a place he rented by the week and that they optimistically called an apartment. Part of my brain rebelled against the aberration of those two idiots seeing themselves as a “couple,” even if it didn’t go beyond a tacit, instrumental association — temporary, very temporary. Part of me still believed in a cosmic justice that makes people disappear when they become too stupid, that, when they pass certain limits of shamelessness and self-humiliation, just freezes them out of pity. Still, I’ve always been naive. I don’t even think she had to touch his cock, bathed as he was in the pleasure of being taken for a white knight. Though of course, between a man and a woman these things can never be assumed.

What Bicente wanted was to teach me a lesson, which any way you look at it was a much more powerful motive than libido. I remember him only too well, hunched on that sofa (surrounded by Buddhas!), trying to convince us that smoking marijuana was very bad. I guess at a certain point you get sick of your guests forgetting your name; you want to shake yourself out of the sad, stupefied role that your stand-ins act out on the stages of other people’s minds. Maybe he was hurting from being cheated on, who knows? When you look a certain way not even money can protect you, and he wasn’t that loaded by the standards of get-rich-quick Spain, where bandolero-investors and moneymen swoop about like bloody Baron von Munchausens. Anyway, Bicente saw the chance to give a performance in the role of his life, to score a goal on the other team’s field; he’d be a champion of pure love, the defender of marriage.

“If you stick your nose into this again, Vicente, I’ll rip it right off.”

It was a reasonable answer to the five daily messages that Helen left on the machine, with the restrained tone Bicente advised, and the fifteen she spat at me like poisoned arrows when she was alone in the apartment.

One of those days, I started to get a sharp pain in my back. The disks were coming out of their cushions of bone; I had to stand up or lie down, I couldn’t even think about sitting. The tension irritated the tissues of my back, and waves of pain radiated outward. When it comes to other people I’m very much against painkillers, but I was quite indulgent with my own suffering. I started to take something stronger than Nolotil. I never got rid of the pain; it stayed there, scraping away at my fibers. But at least the drug separated it from my brain — I could see it floating there in an isolated capsule, and it didn’t touch me. The downside was that I went around practically sleepwalking, and given the situation, a clear mind would have come in handy.

Bicente’s plan was to tail me. He gathered information from the “friends” I turned to back then for some crumbs of social sustenance. He was trying to “catch me by surprise”—or so said the people who came to visit me after the debacle was over, happy to find me alive, consoling me in my convalescence.

I imagine the two of them there in the apartment, by the light of those candles that stink of sandalwood (these invented memories are as vivid as ever), eating pizza (Bicente with a knife and fork), using all four hands to draft their convoluted plan to intercept me. All they needed to do was come see me at the door to my office. If I’d known they weren’t even capable of that, I could have saved myself the hassle of synchronizing my exit to the street with the arrival of the 45 bus, and the pathetic little race across Via Augusta, one hand bracing my burning back. Just let them spend three or four nights feeling like intelligent creatures whose “ideas” could actually influence the course of events; I certainly won’t be giving them any credit for a simple plan in an open world. We humans with our games, what a spectacle we’d be for the extraterrestrial heavens, if only they weren’t deserted. I suppose Helen didn’t want to meet me in the open; she was looking for a chance to confront me in an apartment with walls and doors, among other people. And so the two of them go on puzzling it out: Helen is lying on the floor, covering (and emphasizing!) her loins with a napkin soaked in pepperoni juice, while she incites the “strategist” to devise the best way to catch me unawares. Bicente paces about in shirtsleeves, feeling like a titan in the waves of humid air. Then he sits down and takes off his glasses, folds them up, and leaves them on the bedside table, because once upon a time a girl (his cousin) told him he had sad and dreamy eyes. She left that flower pinned to his breast and he’s not ever going to let it dry out.

It was only a matter of time before we’d run into each other. From a distance, every city is an archipelago of provincialism, a narrow colony, and that half-assed party in another sumptuous apartment was as good a place as any. I know it was planned because the guests couldn’t help exchanging little glances. Terrible actors, so anxious to get me into the cage with the beast — how it entertains us when people separate, reconcile, intermingle, yell, kiss. Whatever nature-lovers may say, trees are a bore; they will always be far below even the most anodyne human in terms of entertainment potential, there’s no comparison.

I don’t think they put Lisandra in the mix as part of the plan, but who knows? I’d spent weeks with no stimulation except the occasional sex scene on late-night TV, but I’ve never been one for solo love. My veins were twisting like wires to restrain the built-up libido, which itself was developing a complicated system of inexplicably precise fetishes: fine ankles, rhomboid faces, names rich in fricatives. It was just that Lisandra liked tall boys, and I was wearing the blue jacket that night; it was just that I liked the delicate awkwardness of her body language when she started flirting, I liked the eagerness for fun that lit her face for half a minute, and the way that fire shrank, smothered in timidity, without going out entirely, smoldering like a hot ember. I liked that she was dark and thin, that she was so much the kind of girl I had always imagined for myself before Hurricane Helen ruined my juvenile expectations. I let the image of us together float calmly in an imagined future, and I liked what I saw.

So we started to exchange words that slid one over the other as if they were caressing or encouraging one another, smoothed by the foregone conclusion that a good impression would be made: words that were more mood-music than meaning. I won’t say it could have gone on until her lips separated for a kiss, but certainly long enough to populate the nighttime mind with pleasant ideas. I was enveloped in that soft mood when I saw him slaloming through the guests, one arm raised and waving frantically. The parting in his hair drawn with a ruler, his collar starched, that little beard, the type on whom age will settle like a corrective to the anomaly of youth: Bicente.

My first impulse was to head him off and smash his face in, but it tends to be complicated explaining to a girl like Lisandra the curative powers of working out rage with your hands.

“Just let her talk to you, Juan-Marcos.”

And I did. I allowed Helen to come up to me in a corner of the room, while man-trays passed carrying cold cuts and canapés of margarine and imitation caviar and emu tartar. Helen’s mouth and lips conspired to produce sounds directed toward my ear, but I paid no attention. I let myself be carried along by the fatigue of a boy who, burning with vital fire, dips his Boy Scout feet into a marriage and who ends up lost in the maze of female complications: a mere puppy still wet behind the ears. For almost three years I had been the one in love, the weak party in the agreement; I got used to following Helen’s changing whims. But a furious convulsion had inverted the situation, driving me from the depths to the summit of our coupledom, where I enjoyed the luminous role of being the desired one. I felt like giving her a hug to celebrate our newfound freedom from that stagnant imbroglio, but Helen was still Helen, and she went on talking about commitment, about our shared project (though the apartment was rented in my name, her fallopian tubes weren’t carrying anything fertilized by me, and a civil marriage is, well, a civil marriage), but I didn’t bother answering or refuting her words. I looked at her from a distance of thousands of miles, protected by a splendid smile of new superiority.

“I’m bored, Helen. Let’s talk another time. I’m sure we’ll get the chance if you’re going to stay with Bicente.”

And I turned my back on her, walked away from her pre-cooked words, left her chewing on her rage, soaked in the delicious acidic taste of her saliva. I don’t even remember what she was wearing — her image no longer made my optic nerve vibrate. On the fly I caught a toasted rectangle spread with a creamy paste of something salmon-like, and I took my time chewing it and brushing away the crumbs with the back of my hand. And then I realized that the tables and plates and lamps were all the correct color: seeing Helen hadn’t added an ounce of intensity to the material world, I was still surrounded by the matte of disenchantment. My feet moved to the rhythm of the background music, I could have burst into song, I felt like taking off my jacket and stretching my arms, I felt taller, a true champion. I ran into Lisandra, standing with another brunette who has an even smaller role in this story, though her eyes curdled with a flattering complicity. What friends we could have been in a different life, that creature and me, her humble servant. But it was Lisandra’s face I first saw contort into a grimace of alarm stretching out for long seconds like spilled mercury, preceding the slice through the skin of my trapezius: an injection of cold pain that spread through my nerves to the top of my chest.

Though she pulled the weapon out stained with the fibers and threads of my flesh, the Butcher of Montana repeated the operation, and any way you look at it, that’s aggravation. But she must have used up all her strength, because — as they told me later — this second attempt didn’t go as deep into my back. And they had to tell me about it later, because I collapsed before I’d really understood what was happening, what she was doing to me. Helen must have thought she’d killed me, maybe felt a tingling of horror in her hands; she ran out and took the weapon with her. From the width and depth of the wounds, she could easily have used ordinary scissors, but somehow I’m sure the object she drove into my flesh was the marble letter opener that disappeared when I kicked her out. It was Bicente who called the paramedics and climbed into the ambulance, which held up traffic as it carried me over damp streets, warm and blue, to the Hospital del Mar. They dumped me straight into a bed because they were afraid (because of the wound’s location, because of my heroic faint; the doctor congratulated me for having fallen so well, I barely even bit my tongue) that I had a perforated pulmonary vein.

Under the heavy smell of chloroform, I wanted only to live. Lying between sheets that smelled of bitter fruits, I realized that dying is a pretty immodest affair. If Helen had hit my pulmonary wall, if she’d popped my consciousness like a balloon, I would have left behind several half-watched films, wet clothes in the machine, an unfinished tube of hand lotion, coffee dregs in cups, financial reports still to be deciphered, the bank account with an overdraft I was putting off resolving, a modest collection of more or less personal objects to be catalogued and which no one would ever use again…not to mention all the days that none of my senses would brush against, a mind-boggling luxury for other people to enjoy…not to mention the ideas ambushed by the primitive emotions, warm like stables, that overtake us as we sink into decrepitude. I’m not surprised Dad didn’t think about how he’d end up with his calluses exposed.

I could barely move under the weight of the painkillers. I tried to protest — by now I wasn’t going to die by Helen’s hand, but if they went on like that they’d annihilate my immune system. And I was far from sure that my roommate, Mr. Ponç, a blind man who twisted with laughter at the jokes on TV, was free of viruses. Hospitals finish people off, you’ve got all kinds of microbes that breed in decomposing organs let loose in the air. Those bugs are just looking for a fleshy opening so they can lace up their boots and get to work, but try telling that to the surgeons with their white coats and sadistic flair for cutting and sewing. The patient is only there to keep quiet until he gets bedsores in his crack, and if you must know, I was too tired to argue. So tired I let Bicente approach the foot of my bed, and from there that toad — I picture him covered in slimy scales — told me in a soft, confessional voice how Helen wouldn’t get out of bed, how she couldn’t get over the idea that she would have to live with a murder (that she was a murderer!). Depressed and drugged, what a novelty. The only surprise was that she’d had the energy to chase me down and stab me. But still, he was so dejected, so weak, that I promised him I wouldn’t press charges.

And the reason I made that promise was not a magnanimous one, oh no! I did it precisely to annoy my sister, who in the meantime had appointed herself the representative of the fragmented Miró-Puig family. Mother certainly wasn’t going to leave her living room for anything less than six stab wounds, and my father remained stubbornly dead, so it was Madame Popo who parked her bulging backside on my bed each and every afternoon to offer advice, pampering, and admonitions. She hadn’t exactly grown a triple chin — she’d be what your Grandma Rosa permissively calls “chubby”—but she’d definitely suffered a big jump in her calorific intake. The increase in body mass had blurred the wavering line of her self-esteem. She was entering a phase of bottom-feeding for affection.

Of course she reproached me for having married a murderer, and for being profligate, but I didn’t hold it against her — her brain was too slow to realign her language with her new objectives. I could hear the goodwill in her tone, in the warmth of her speech:

“You’re an absolute idiot, Juan.”

Best of all is that she showed up with one of those green cardboard folders that have charted the progress of my growing poverty. She’d summoned the Passgard people (though now they were Passgard & Helsengør) in order to confess that Dad had left her an apartment, a secret London flat: another love nest for that crow, or an expensive way of protecting my sister from our indifferent mother, who with or without the pills was capable of leaving everything to me. She told me that Dad had summoned her before she’d left for Boston. They hadn’t gone to the replicant flat, but rather to a bar that was like a fried-food sauna.

“It was like having a conversation on a grill. I felt like crying. I didn’t know what to make of his plan. I put off signing the papers, he kept insisting — he’d never paid so much attention to me before. He was waiting for the deal to close before he did it. I could have kept him alive longer.”

She told me the flat had made her feel guilty, that her property secret shamed her, and her aggression toward me had been an effort to shake off that burden. And she added that things were going to be different now, that she would arrange the papers so we shared the flat, she’d take care of me with her own two hands (and the combination of these words and her pinched little smile revolted me, as if they were extracting a live creature from my neck). She said I could use the place, go and live in London.

“It’s beautiful there in spring. You’d be so happy starting a business there. The Catalans just don’t appreciate you.”

I squirmed in my bed, making a frightening noise with the cables, the catheter, and the collapsible breakfast table, and I told her I was sick of having Mother ever-present in my head, of feeling Dad looming no matter where I went. I told her I’d just gotten rid of Helen and I couldn’t possibly feel better, and I didn’t want anyone dictating the rhythm of my days. I was done with following other people’s demands, and I was going to take the reins of my own life.

“You’re really not that good when it comes to taking the reins.”

OK, so that was pretty impolite, but she said it with a sweetness that ruled out clawing at each other’s eyes: beneath the words stirred currents of sisterly concern, and I felt fine.

“You should have dragged that psychopath to court.”

I swallowed it all until the end; it was a stupendous performance. She made her only mistake when she got up to leave: the gold necklace, the marble pants tight around her flabby haunches, the brand of her sunglasses easily legible on the arm, and the princess diamond sparkling on her left index finger. People can’t just shed their skins; they may think they’ve cut something loose, but their old selves survive. My sister hadn’t given up on competing in attractiveness (women of her size have a very faithful fan base); it was only a passing disenchantment: the most repulsive aspects of her character would come crawling right back into place sooner or later. Her animosity was too deep-seated to be soothed with a salve of fat. My sister belongs to that class who only lift a finger the better to slap you; she can’t help it, she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.

The fact is that when Helen called and begged to visit, I encouraged her and let her come. Not because she swore she wouldn’t see Bicente again (what a strategy), but because she had managed to emerge from the garbage can where she’d spent almost a year with only her Daddy for company. I was testing her, because it’s one thing to hear how a woman’s passion is more imperative, no wells of cynicism or safe distances, and it’s quite another to see a girl scrape her initiative off a floor slippery with low self-esteem, then cross the city to fight to keep you.

“Stay. No váyaste. I love you with all my heart. There is nothing more important than a woman in love.”

Her swollen eyes, disheveled hair, her enormous tits, the chewed-up nail of her left index finger (the only one she allowed herself, the one she’d always hidden from Rupert), the peanut shells on the table, that terrible accent when she pronounced the word “soirée,” her little box of pills shuttling from one pocket to another as if they burned her, the unnatural shapes that her lips could adopt, and the expressiveness of her eyes when something didn’t go the way she expected…the echo of so much that had become futile between us, and that now appeared in memories like dead extremities I was too disgusted and frightened to amputate. But on the other hand, there were the hours we had drunk of so deeply without noticing them pass, and there was the inconceivable number of people who were not Helen and I: people who don’t reheat our leftover stew on our stove, who never think to call our house or ask how things are going for us. She’d sorted out everything with her parents over the phone, without resorting to spells and incantations, and now she was feeling better; and, honestly, how many girls do you know who can say they love you with all their heart and not die of embarrassment at the cheesiness of it all? She convinced me that nothing should be more important in this shitty world where people break down and get lost and grow old and die than a silly blonde from Montana who was in love with me. That’s why I let her stay.

I let her stay because, as the effect of the painkillers ebbed away from the empty crevice in my flesh, the sliced veins, arteries, and capillaries sent out waves of pain that were too distracting; really, I asked her to stay because the hospital food was rubbish and Helen managed to bring in some delicious Japanese; I asked her to stay because I couldn’t resist her idiotic idea, stolen from Colombian soap operas or women’s magazines, of fixing our relationship by going to a spa hidden in the pines; I begged her to stay because I saw something alive in her eyes that might let us regain some of our intimacy, and although I wasn’t in great shape and hand jobs are the bottom rung of teenage fantasies, it was delicious to watch as she managed the doctors, the nurses, the family of the blind guy they’d unzipped from pubis to throat to remove an invasive vine of ganglia, all so we could have a little privacy. And you tell me what other body part is connected more closely to the brain and its innumerable ideas about life and love and death than the hand: hundreds of nerve bunches encouraging contact between the delicate sensibility of what you would probably call the penis, and the body of the wife in love, so gentle in its touch, so soft in its handling. I think it was while we were in transit between dry and wet (me simulating the sort of abominable pain that drags you feetfirst toward death, Helen smiling the way a person can only smile if they’re born in the United States, call their father Daddy, and have hair that grows in vexing waves, blonde and healthy) that she took the opportunity to say what she’d come there to say:

“Now you can’t leave me, it would be a mistake to leave me, don’t you see? It’s impossible to leave.”

So Helen proposed we spend a few days at the spa. She asked to visit her parents first (Daddy would pay for the ticket) and bring Jackson (she mentioned the kid’s name before clarifying where he fit into the family framework), and although the roots of my spirit were still buried in damp, dark earth, rich in the minerals of fear and alarm, I took shelter in the cliché of foolish minds, I ignored my sense of foreboding: I said yes.

Aren’t intuitions odd? No more than two months ago, while I was gathering Pedro-María’s dirty clothes (but not his underwear) to try out the laundry sink, I thought of the word “chicle,” which had been our cue to execute the suicide play that could bring us back from a ten-point deficit in two minutes. The afternoon we played on IPSI’s court, a premonition had flashed before me that things weren’t going to turn out well; and it really was a mess, they’d practiced escaping our trap with a simple throw from the baseline. We found ourselves losing by a lot and on the opponents’ court, with the stands full of middle-class parents just dying to teach a lesson to those posh snobs from Bonanova, whose representatives were a bunch of teenagers in shorts. Doesn’t that happen to you all the time — don’t you get warnings? I have a theory, though I haven’t worked out the equations to prove it, and so far the astrophysicists have ignored it. If our universe is surrounded by an almost infinite number of other universes, there’s no reason that at any given instant each of them couldn’t occupy a different point in time, and if a godlike eye were to observe all of them simultaneously, it would understand that there is a universe for every past, present, and future second, that time is concurrent. It’s hard to explain how I reached this conclusion; what I need now is for you to empty your mind of prejudices, because if the different universes move in gentle undulations, forming folds like the frills of a summer dress, you’ll see that there must be fleeting moments when one plane of experience moves so close to another wave of the cloth that you get glimpses of the future, like smooth, bloodless visions, broadcasts about what we will become. So if I’m right, being alive is like having a conversation with other “me’s” dispersed throughout the cosmic ocean.

Just as I’d unclogged the laundry sink, Pedro-María came home with an envelope and a smile: he’d bought two tickets to Sónar.

“I had to get back to the hunt sometime, Johan. Plus, Jeff Mills is DJing.”

Since I’d been bugging him for months, I didn’t have the strength to dissuade him. So we ended up at a dance party, and while I was trying to adapt to the space and the electronic noises, Pedro-María started shaking out his psychic garbage with arm movements of aboriginal inspiration. He called over a guy who, after an impatient scowl, opened his hand, and in its creases were three capsules that reminded me of seeds in a fairy tale. The last gin and tonic had gone to my head too quickly, I wasn’t up for pills. Neither was Saw, but his brain was demanding an altered sensibility. I watched as the girls came over and Pedro divvied up his magic beans. He interpreted my refusal as censure, but while he was rising to the role of man of the night, tracing wakes of obscene honey in the air to attract those girls so eager to show off their asses, I started feeling down. My spirit sank until it hit the safety valve that keeps us from collapsing entirely. I think that must be how people who don’t secrete enough enthusiasm feel: I stopped feeling concerned with existence, I was too removed from living things. It was horrible, it didn’t hurt, and I’ve never felt worse. But the moment passed.

Once things cleared up, I saw Pedro-María approaching. He was stumbling so much it seemed impossible he would stay upright. One of the girls (the one with the bandanna) was trying to hold him up with both hands. She was truly selfless when she stuck them under his armpits, but she couldn’t support his weight. If she hadn’t let go she would have gone right down with him.

He managed to stand up without help, almost with a jump, and he laughed either at the effort or at the fright of finding himself upright so suddenly. He tried to keep his balance by reaching out his arms like Christ, hardly staggering at all.

“We have to go home.”

“Now?”

I was annoyed by how he leaned against me with his entire weight, and it took me a few minutes to grasp just how drunk he really was: his fingertips, slimy with sweat, deposited in my palm the pill he’d only pretended to swallow.

“I’ve done something terrible. Let’s go home or I’ll die.”

As you can see, I’ve gained a fair bit of experience with scenes and hysterical episodes — I know how to recognize when a brain is seriously overheating. I said good-bye to the girls for both of us, regretting I wouldn’t be there to help them through the difficult period of growing up that lay in wait for them. I assumed he would think it was a good idea to go to my place, since it was closer.

“I’m afraid of your apartment, John.”

We didn’t have cash, and the machine spat our debit cards back out (his demagnetized; mine without enough credit for a ticket), so we jumped the turnstiles. I cut myself, I have no idea how, from my fingernail to the bone that sticks out at the wrist.

Pedro was having trouble breathing and I had to unbutton his shirt; the cloth was soaked in the sweat that seeps out when your pores open wide like buttonholes. I tried to help by fanning him with a free paper we found on the seat, but to be honest I don’t really think those blasts of suffocating air did him any good. I couldn’t get him to sit still, and at every toss of the metro — you really can’t beat the L5 in that respect — he slid from one end of the seat to the other. I was out of tissues and the blood was still gushing from my wounded hand.

He was so white that the train’s fluorescent light gave him a greenish hue, and he started shaking like an abductee. His eyeballs turned milky like a blind man’s; it was pretty revolting, but I couldn’t just get up and leave, it could have been an epileptic fit, or a brain fungus, who knows? I don’t have the imagination to turn symptoms into a diagnosis. Really, I only gave him those two slaps to let off my frustration, but they worked. Now he was gasping and motionless, like a fish pulled from the water.

“Get me out of here.”

I tried to deter him, but he opened his shirt more, as if the oxygen were burning his lungs. I managed to get us back to the street (and it’s laughable that a process involving such a tangle of arms and legs can fit into such a short phrase). Our new challenge was to cross La Meridiana; it seemed more important to stop a taxi on the opposite side of the street than to reach the pedestrian crossing fifteen meters away, and the cars swerved around us, leaving a wake of blaring horns in the air. From a certain distance (Pedro dragging his feet — the bastard made no effort at all) we looked like a kind of suicide commando unit: our shirts open, hair all over the place, in the unmistakable style of best friends.

“You hit me.”

“You were dying.”

“I’m not dying. Look at me, I’m alive.”

The next test consisted of convincing the taxi driver that giving us a free ride would make him feel better than ten shitty euros that wouldn’t even cover lunch. I tried to focus on a strategy, but my thoughts skidded on a stream of adrenaline. I had determined to open the door and dash for the sidewalk when finally Saw came up with a blue bill.

“OK, gouge us all you like.”

It was a joke from back when we used to find it amusing to challenge adult authority. It didn’t matter that the joke was wearing thin by now — it opened a crack in the present and we let ourselves follow teenage rules. We shot out of the cab toward the front door, without waiting for our change or the receipt we had demanded so we’d seem important. My calves tensed, my heart couldn’t pump enough blood to my thighs so I could speed up, and Pedro-María with his flamingo stride pulled half a length in front of me; I let him go. He waited for me in the doorway with his fingers brushing the wood and a smile on his lips.

“Sprint, wall, return.”

I touched the wall a second after him, enough to give him an advantage. It was the phrase we’d heard every time we went onto the court after classes ended, our warm-up exercise, only now it entailed crossing Córcega in the dark, wasted, dodging taxis and motorcycles. I suppose we were lucky, although it’s also true that the years between us and the agile boys we used to be were imperceptible to the metallic sky above and the stars spinning slowly around their inconceivable axes. He beat me again. I think he was spurred on by fear — I was always the braver one. He fell to the ground in celebration of his victory, and I threw myself on top of him.

“We used to be twice as fast.”

“Twice, the man says. More, much more!”

The roots of my teeth hurt from the effort, the lactic acid flowed as if my hypothalamus had gone crazy: crystals in my veins, micro-tears in the muscles; I had a week of aches ahead of me. It was true — and what an incredible truth it was — that the juvenile vigor I’d longed for so impatiently as a boy, when the older kids caught the rebound, touched the basket, fought for position at the post, had come to pass: it had entered my body, and then it had left.

Pedro-María was doubled over in laughter, but I didn’t want any advantage. I let him calm down, regain his competitive composure.

“That was the warm-up. Now comes the grand finale, the deciding race.”

“For the World Crown.”

“Sprint, wall, return.”

This time I made sure to get up before him (my hand holding on to his ankle), and I moved a good few meters ahead. When a motorcycle wouldn’t let me cross, I had to stop short. Pedro-María passed me, but he lost his lead when a bus came barreling down in front of him; the driver leaned on his horn and I managed to catch up. He had a slight advantage that under normal conditions would have been decisive, but the thing is I’d taken a lot of beatings recently, I was sick of my shitty losing streak, so I grabbed him by his coattails and I more or less threw him to the pavement. He managed to stand up, crane that he was, before a car could run him over, but now nothing on earth could stop me. I even let myself take the last steps imitating the Pink Panther (though I don’t think he got the reference).

“I won! I won!”

“You cheated A LOT.”

“How?”

“You grabbed me, stepped on me, pushed me.”

“All that counts, it was for the World Crown, no holds barred. I won and you lost.”

What came next was a lecherous surge of adrenaline from my gonads to my chest. The old feeling of competing and winning was burning in my veins, a medulla breathing at full capacity; our bodies give us so much. I expected Pedro to be offended, but here was an intoxicated and smiling boy who moved toward me with open arms. It was as if, after that exertion, our fiftyish skins were turning transparent, and peeking through were the generous youths we had once been, overflowing with vitality and burgeoning energy, who had accidentally fallen into middle age. As we hugged, I swore I could hear the pounding of our hearts.

We took turns trying to get the door open, and when we finally managed it we were greeted by a blast of reheated dust. I was about to make a comment about how the past was angry at being kept locked up in there — surely it would rather mix with the present and be subject to changing styles and depreciation — but I’d hardly gotten his coat off before he collapsed on the sofa.

Since he wasn’t going to die of drunkenness anymore (I took his pulse), and when it came to sleeping and blowing saliva bubbles with his thick lips I thought he could manage on his own, I promised I’d be right back and I started nosing around.

Before I reached the kitchen, I was drawn to the laptop’s shining bluish light. Of course I had some qualms, what do you take me for? It’s just that the only discipline I’ve seen in Pedro-María during my brief vacation at his apartment is his practice of turning off the machine before leaving the room. It couldn’t be a mistake — it was a plea for me to visit his spiritual cyber storeroom. Wasn’t he already throwing enough money down the drain with that shrink? I lived with him, I was his friend. If I let the opportunity pass to collect information on his other habits, I’d be acting irresponsibly. I’d be a real traitor.

I entertained myself trying to guess his e-mail password (“Isabel,” “chicle,” “Rastabú”), but I grew tired of battling a mud-coated mind, and I opened Safari. He had cleared his history recently, but there was a trail of two hours of activity: UFO sightings, a Wikipedia page on cockroaches (which turned my stomach) with special focus on the “German” kind, two articles in El Mundo about the future of Spain’s monarchy, and a list of pornographic sites.

I know teenagers aren’t the only people who use those sites to discover what sex has in store. There are bachelors who relieve themselves at home before heading out into the fray, and even partnered citizens who want to add a little carnal edge to their desire, a hygienic relief for the intricate detours the sexual imagination takes. I know that stuff is out there, within reach of any router. It’s just that, though I learned the technique of jerking off when I was young, I didn’t much take to it. Girls came on to the scene soon enough, and they were so willing to be kissed and caressed I was afraid of turning into a fag if I indulged in a habit that didn’t require them. It was so much warmer as a couple than with the carousel of filth you could summon to your lonely den. As I was striking out on my humanitarian mission, I already knew I’d find it unpleasant to see living beings who weren’t me coupling and grunting. No one has to explain to me what sort of fantasies can take shape in a brain burning with excitement, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the level of specialization private licentiousness had achieved: “public humiliations,” “dwarves in disguises,” “black women tied up and crying,” and my favorite, “pregnant women who come stamping on apples.” Compared to those filigrees, my tastes are very plain.

It must be amazing to have all that within half a dozen clicks as you’re becoming sexually aware. For us, Swedish porn had already been a major leap forward. It supposedly trained you for recreational sex, though in my case I was quite relieved to learn that most girls aren’t that interested in double penetration. But none of those magazines you’d buy on the sly and keep in a bag until the house was empty could hold a candle to the bottomless pit the Internet excavates on your screen, with all those possibilities illustrated and animated. Those poor parents who put their trust in Google’s “safe search” (ha!) and Apple’s “content filter” (ha ha!). Nothing is going to hold back the curiosity of a fourteen-year-old specialized in the production of semen and pus. Nature likes its fathers callow; ours (although not Dad, specifically) would laugh when they found us with that kind of material, and play the bad boy: “You’re not going to find anything there I don’t already know.” Don’t think your stepfather was a prude, Jackson. It’s just that the map of human arousal is full of places your girl isn’t going to like, ones I doubt even your precocious mother (wherever she is) knows about.

I didn’t have the courage to go on investigating the digital trail of the desires of Pedro-María (whom I spent a long week afterward looking at in disgust), but since it felt good to take a break from his actual presence, I headed over to his Facebook page. The same photos, songs, and comments I could see from my own profile; I had never delved into his list of “friends,” and my attention was caught by a lump of pink flesh that could only be my sister. They must have met in the Bonanova apartment, or when Dad made her come and cheer for us on game days. I took it as a mutual intrusion that entitled me to address a few fresh words to that twit under the digital mask of Saw’s identity. They ranged from self-indulgent (You have no idea what a wonderful person your brother is) to mean harassment (He never talks about you, but if he happens to mention your name, it’s only to refer to your weight), passing through crude obscenity (Suck my ass, nitwit), but then my ideas dried up while I wondered if Popovych was aware that his wife was offering herself to the world like an odalisque advertising her availability. She was smiling with her arms crossed, two heaps of meaty fat that hung like broken tools. Maybe Popo tolerated it, maybe he encouraged her, who knows? After all, the only thing you learn as part of a couple is that marriages are inexplicable.

I went on looking through names, profiles. It was funny to see how people handle their profile pictures: complicated framings, cars that oozed status, photographs they “identified” with. I was amazed by the girls, flirtatious idiots, alternating photos of kids (they’ve given birth to so many it’s a joke, they used to seem so different from their mothers and aunts) and vignettes of them in bikinis under an August blue that stretched out behind them with the sole purpose of providing a lively backdrop for their poses.

The men take care not to let their bellies show on Facebook, but when they’re on the beach they reach opportunistic truces with their extra weight. What the women decide to show the world — after snapping two hundred selfies — is the happy maternal expansion that rounds their breasts, cheeks, and hips, with the frame cut off just where the flesh spills past their idea of what’s tolerable. There was Sonia with the explosion of lascivious freckles on her cheeks, and the insinuating pleats of skin on Carmen Calvo’s underarms, and the handlebar of fat that hung over Vanesa’s elegant rump (wasn’t she the one who used to jump hurdles?). They were unable to resist both displaying and hiding the bodies they cultivate, and that mortify them. I should visit them one by one wherever they’re spending their lives, have a little chat to convince them that, as much airtime as the lithe young things may receive, what really gets me going isn’t low-fat diets. It’s when I’m out and about and I come across one of those behinds belonging to a girl from school, molded by almost fifty years of life and lavish lunches. It’s always a good day when we can greet each other (Mancebo, Sandra, Laura, Cardelús, some called by first names, others by last) and catch up, exchange amiable lies and half-withered memories. They were priceless, those melancholic asses that were impossible to ignore during our conversations (where do you work, how do they treat you, do you have ambitions still to satisfy, what do you fear, do you think that in twelve years much has happened that was really worth it, do you think about it constantly?). How erotic a shared past can be! Sandra, Vanesa and Vanessa, Laura, Mancebo, Díaz, Laura, Carmen-Olga Calvo, only now do we see things clearly: we were presumptuous, too young to calculate the emotional advantages of being mammals who can ruminate on past experiences the way dromedaries spit and swallow. We should have slept together more! But don’t think I’m the one turning melancholic now — that kind of girly sentiment isn’t my style. The only thing I’ve saved of Helen’s is one of her bras, stored away in a secret compartment that you never noticed. I mentally superimposed it on the lovers who came later, measuring the exact amount of pleasure my hands have sacrificed. That’s all the nostalgia I allow myself.

I took a second to consult the oracle of Safari about Eloy Larumbe. It seemed like the perfect night to satisfy the curiosity I’d been repressing because I’d never looked closely at a transsexual before. Let’s just say the photos I found were ads for his new line of work — his rates weren’t bad at all, though the line where he claimed to be twenty-seven was certainly funny. I wasn’t clear whether it was guys or girls who paid to sleep with her or him, but Eloise was certainly an alluring creature. You really had to look hard under the makeup to find his simpleton’s features in the nose and cheekbones reworked with a scalpel. The luxuriant mane, implants in the breast and gluteus — not even the defiant gaze recalled Eloy’s doubtful expression (maybe there were drugs that changed how the pupil and iris worked) — but if I snatched my fingers from the keyboard as if it were on fire, it wasn’t because my body was reacting to Larumbe’s little poses in a catsuit, but because my host’s voice sounded through the apartment’s stillness:

“Johan!”

I expected to find him much worse off; he was sitting up with his coat draped over his shoulders.

“I dreamed I was drowning. Sit down. I want to talk. Please.”

A cold and bright light shone in from Córcega — an office building, cleaning women, open files. But he asked me to turn on the little lamp; we would talk enveloped in a green radiance. An intimate touch.

“I have to tell you. I can’t keep it bottled up any longer. I was unfaithful to Isabel.”

He didn’t even hide that the whole mess was set in motion long after the harpy had robbed him of his daughter. In a way, he was savoring the wiry bond of imagined guilt that kept him tied to them.

I watched as he took the photographs out of another one of his envelopes. This time, the woman’s name was Cris. They had met on a forum for photography enthusiasts, they sent each other private messages, and soon enough they found shared tastes: Leonard Cohen, Knight Rider, Al Pacino films; they were both unconvinced by Bob Dylan’s electric phase. They met in person at a forum get-together, and before long they split off from the group and did what they could to laugh. He found Cris attractive in her own way: red hair, wide hips, naive accent (she was from Zaragoza). They wandered into a grove of fir trees, the conversation flowed easily and their defenses gradually came down. They talked of relationship troubles: they’d both been through nasty divorces, both were terrified of entering the next decade alone, they didn’t feel like dodging suitors if they ever decided to look in earnest. There were children in circulation: three for Cris, one for Pedro (he didn’t miss the chance to joke that his daughter didn’t really circulate much). They came to a meadow shaded by a chestnut tree whose branches seemed to be bleeding. It was irresistible for these aficionados, so they took out their Nikons, and Cris told him that when he was shooting he seemed to come alive. They sat down on a bed of crunchy leaves and talked about their jobs. Her vagueness didn’t escape Pedro’s notice, but he let it go when she repeated that he couldn’t let talent like his go to waste.

“She’s good, too.”

Cris’s photos insisted on using a contortionist’s perspective; they were better, livelier than Pedro’s. She wasn’t fooling herself — she was aware that she and Pedro had too many gaps in their training, that they could only play at being photographers in the forum’s limited and somewhat artificial atmosphere of mutual admiration. But the camera gave them a conversational territory and a road to follow, their reciprocal flattery sped the friendship toward a more intimate place. The heart is prone to be dazzled.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays they used e-mail like an instant messaging service. Pedro tended to write his responses emboldened by alcohol, to the point that he improvised a promise to visit her in Zaragoza. Cris replied that on the date he proposed she wouldn’t have the kids. I’m sure that whatever day Pedro had suggested, she wouldn’t have had the kids. The AVE train cost him an arm and a leg, and he spent the journey cursing himself: the landscape dotted with border shrubs, that immense dry plain below folds of sandy mountains that he watched out the window, it crushed his spirit. He didn’t even find Cris that attractive, it was an adventure that wasn’t going to leave any permanent mark on his life.

The train pulled into the immense station at Delicias and Cris was waiting for him, looking like a diminutive doll in the middle of the platform, hands folded, feet together, wearing a blue raincoat. She gave him a tour that consisted of two plazas and a garden. It was Cris’s lively voice that gradually won him over, and he was impressed by her welcome: clean apartment, light-filled and cool, topped off with the aroma of onions and peppers in a homemade meat stew. He didn’t plop onto the sofa, but sat down at the already-set table. While Cris headed into the kitchen to add the final touches to the meal, he savored every second as his body sank into the upholstery’s firm sponginess. When he saw the napkin holder engraved with her initials, his hands quivered with pleasure.

“Do you like rosé?”

He volunteered to uncork the bottle. Cris brought him a pair of slippers in case he wanted to take his shoes off, but they weren’t the right size. It turned out she worked in a supermarket; twice, she specified she was a manager. She cleared plates and the leftovers of that poignant stew with a magician’s skill, and served him a bowl of strawberries with fresh cream. What a coincidence — she couldn’t have known it was his favorite dessert. She told him she’d spent two years in art school, only to learn that she didn’t like competition. Also, she’d had to take care of her mother. Photography was her passion, and so was drinking a half-dozen beers in a bar where you could hear real music. One day, they could go together.

“Look at her, Johan. We can’t all rob cradles like you. She’s pretty.”

She was one of those reasonable women who move through the world and wear themselves out trying to do it well. Surrounded by boys so tall and imaginative she couldn’t hold on to them with that unremarkable body — not to mention the healthy contents of her head — she’d never managed to truly set anyone on fire. She’d had to resign herself to an average husband: a serious guy, honorable, hardworking, able to impregnate her. A reasonable man with whom she’d had it reasonably bad, one who’d wanted to have three kids and shelter them in an atmosphere of everyday affection, and who after a rough patch had ended up leaving. And what Cris was looking for now was a companion to go drinking with, someone to laugh and to row the boat with, someone to plan totally unaffordable trips with, someone with whom she could revive the pleasure of being part of a couple, who would utter her name again with interest, a person who maybe doesn’t completely convince you, but who sticks around and whose touch protects you from the world’s coldness.

Of course, a woman with three kids and a fugitive husband would catch on right away that this guy, frayed and forty-something, spent most of the week being neurotic and unsociable, and that she’d be better off not quitting her respectable job, because he wasn’t fit for the world. The most ambitious version of Cris — a girl who deemed her chances to still be on the rise — would have ruled Pedro out at first sight because he lacked any initiative of his own, the kind of ambition that drives a guy onward toward ever-better moments. You’ll struggle to understand, since you’re the kind of woman who always gets the most interesting man, the one who knows where to take you to dinner, what dresses to buy you, what sights to see when you travel to flashy-sounding foreign countries. But she was in the intermediate phase of life, when you have to cross the unknown territory that yawns between the plans of your thirties and the grandparent years of your seventies, and Pedro could supply her with the minimum. She could boast about her photographer boyfriend in circles where he’d win points just for being from Barcelona. What that woman wanted was to have a shot at the agreeable side of life, with a guy who was neither violent nor a Jehovah’s Witness.

And after all, what good did it do you to marry a connoisseur if he couldn’t pay for a car or take you on vacation? What good did it do you to get married thinking I was going to be “someone”? It’s funny: we navigate our way among the expectations that others dream up for us in their own minds, as if it weren’t enough to go plunging into middle age wrapped in our own clouds of hopes, ideas, and fantasies about the future. Thirties, forties, fifty-five…and we still end up in strange places, small apartments, goals like boxes. Age is our reality tutor.

Pedro and Cris had natural attraction on their side, which helped — it’s what happens when a man and a woman find themselves finished with their respective turmoils, it’s how bodies come to rest together. Cris took her clothes off too quickly; he saw the soft folds of her belly, the stretch marks that opened like a dry delta. He hadn’t touched a woman in years (they’d fallen by the wayside, one, two, three, without making much noise). He was surprised again at the temperature, a hot-water balloon; he made her blush when he let his gaze fall between her thighs, to the burgeoning, straggly fuzz that made him think of threads in a living fabric.

“She wanted me and I wanted her, I really did. I felt it in my thighs and stomach, but nothing happened down there, it didn’t respond to anything we did. Like it was disconnected from the rest of my body.”

Cris’s caresses as she tried to stimulate him only reminded him that his virility was buried deep within him; her touch kept him company as the black tide of shame and guilt engulfed him.

“I even started talking to my dick. I encouraged it, bullied it, tried to convince it to wake up, I apologized for making it enter a girl without asking its permission. And when I finished all that, and it was clear nothing was going to happen, I realized for the first time ever the thing is just an overrated flap of skin.”

And she took it like a grown-up: she kissed him, ruffled his hair, got dressed, and took him down to the living room. She didn’t even try to get off using Pedro’s lips, fingers, or nose. She started washing dishes, telling him she wasn’t one of those dirty girls, that she’d rather order pizza and beer. And “dirty girl” sounded in Cris’s mouth like the kind of woman who can extract a man’s prostate juice with a massage, who can transform an impotent man into a sexual smorgasbord. Pedro-María didn’t take it too much to heart; she gave him a slap on the back, smiled at him; she cooed at him like a mother to her harmless son.

“I told myself I’d never been that attracted to her anyway. That I’d rather stay outside the lips than stick my swollen dick in there.”

Cris took out a deck of cards, I suppose they must have been tarot, and asked him to draw six. She made some calculations on a napkin, and things looked good for the couple. Turned out they were twinned souls, it was a cosmic coincidence. He would call her, and by talking they would reduce the separation they seemed condemned to by the comedy of work. It was a connection they would have to try hard to put a stop to, and they didn’t want to stop it. They kissed, and after years of underuse he felt his cock start to fill with blood, overcome gravity, and become the master of that impending moment of gratification. It had only been a delay, now they would synchronize. Under that ginger hair, Cris revealed herself to be an engaged lover, who compensated for a meager imagination with her positivity and a sense of humor between the sheets that he found disconcerting.

“You can’t imagine what it was like, Johan, she was alive and crazy for me.”

They lay there smoking like actors in a film’s transition scene. Cris alternated formless puffs of smoke with neat circles that slowly broke apart above their disheveled heads. The skin of her chest was softly dotted with oil nodules, and the dark and voluminous protuberances of her nipples disturbed him. She said to him, bawling like a suckling animal inebriated by being alive under a sky inundated with light:

“This fire is new, Peter, and I’m the one who lit it.”

They bundled up and went out for a walk under some scraggly trees with lilies sprouting from their roots. Stray words of their conversation went on spinning around them, severed from their original phrases. They sat on a restaurant terrace and dined again: ham and scrambled eggs and half a liter of wine. He took out his camera and shot against the streetlights’ bulbs, as if his eyes were sensitive to ghostly charms hidden to other mortal eyes. They brought back beers and spent the rest of the night kissing, looking at photos on the camera screen, and hatching plans that would not only bring him back to Zaragoza, but also involved the apartment on Córcega. Because if one thing was for sure, it was that before she could take a relationship seriously, Cris immediately had to check out the place where her man slept and pissed, look at herself in the same mirror that reflected him, open his closets, feel his shirts.

“Give me time.”

That was what he asked her for: time, no less. He didn’t let himself be bewitched by the beers they’d shared or by the dawn light that shone through the living room windows. He couldn’t get past the reaction he knew she would have when he showed her the museum-house: what Cris would think of those rooms, the plans she would make for the furniture. He couldn’t stand to see her in that imagined scene, her every move tearing apart the tapestry of white lies and exaggerations he had wrapped the portrait of his life in. As she dozed on his shoulder, his resolve weakened; he liked Cris, but he couldn’t suggest they go on seeing each other in Zaragoza every time her kids stayed over at a friend’s house or went on a field trip. He couldn’t afford that rhythm of life. He started to convince himself that Cris was a woman with rapacious and magnificent desires, one who wanted all love’s tenderness and violence, the exalted energy of infatuation that would infect her cell by cell, so she could gather the strength to pry open the doors guarding the greatest things life has to offer.

After agreeing on some vague terms, Pedro returned to Barcelona and received her two e-mails with a mix of happiness and reproach. In the first, Cris updated him on the tarot cards that augured a splendid future together for them (he regretted having made up the time of his birth): “In our four hands there is strength to lift up two lives.” That ridiculousness moved him. The second ruminated over pleasant possibilities and some memories of the ever so complete day they’d spent together.

The proposal came in the third e-mail. Cris’s mother had just died, and that gave her the opening to unveil the plans for the future she was envisioning for the two of them. She had inherited a spacious apartment that was too big for her by herself, near a green and landscaped area, a twenty-minute walk from the city center. It occurred to her that she could rent it out, then she’d have enough to cover the mortgage, and with the remainder plus her salary from the supermarket, she could cover Pedro’s first expenses if he wanted to move into a space filled with her. She’d also taken the liberty (she knew he’d forgive her) of showing his “work” to a friend of her cousin’s who was looking for wedding photographers. Of course, he could move in anytime he wanted, regardless of the apartment. No mention of her children.

The plan was drawn in the trembling hand of wishful thinking, so Cris made sure to slip in a bit about how they could start afresh in a different place, far from Zaragoza, how if he asked her to she would be willing to sell the apartment. And all that Cris begged him for, in exchange for those generous proposals, was that he go with her to her mother’s funeral; she was afraid of facing the father of her children, and her children, whom she hardly ever saw, and she didn’t want to do it alone. Pedro wouldn’t even have to set foot in the funeral home; it would be enough if she could hold him afterward, once they were alone.

Obviously Pedro-María didn’t go. In fact, he didn’t even reply. He blocked her e-mails, let his mobile phone ring for a week and a half — another advantage of not paying for a landline — and then Cris tired of calling.

“Why didn’t you go and see her?”

He could have replied: “When we are alone, men complain about female cunning and calculation, but if a woman opens up to us in gratitude, instead of breathing in her generosity deeply, more often than not we shrink away, tear what they give us to shreds, or flee.” But Saw went with an even more spectacular answer:

“Commitment. I don’t ever want to commit again. I was already burned once by commitment. I’d rather be alone, and I owe it to the apartment. My stomach is burning. It’s hunger. I could use some food, would you make me something?”

“The black boxes. If you want to eat, tell me what the deal is with the black boxes.”

“Cockroaches. They’re roach traps. I turned on the light and caught dozens of them by surprise — I think they were playing football on the floor. They sit there looking at you, teasing, and then they run off on those little thread legs of theirs. Fumigating is no guarantee, they just fill your house with chemical shit, and when the air clears the bugs come out again, more resistant than ever. It’s not easy to fight them; first you have to figure out the race or the species. You’ve got your flying roaches, your Africans, and your Germans.”

“Yours are German.”

“How do you know?”

“I have my ways.”

“They live in kitchens, they’re very family-oriented, they can feed themselves for weeks licking a single drop of rotten milk. They reproduce like…like…well, there’s nothing else that reproduces so quickly….The traps were invented by a strategical genius. The roaches leave trails, and if one doesn’t come back to the nest they try out other routes, without ever leaving your house. The poison in the disks has a delayed effect. It doesn’t do them in until they go back to the nest, and since they eat each other’s corpses, the whole clan is wiped out in a few days.”

“Impressive.”

“And I’ll tell you something else. These days, with you, do you know what? I’ve been able to let things pass, start cooling off. I don’t hate women anymore, even if they’ve stolen my daughter and my self-esteem. I’m hardly afraid of them at all, really. I’m giving up. Understand?”

I didn’t understand. I could accept how a strong and true man could kneel whimpering on the floor to assuage the fury of a woman, I could understand the impulse to stick an electric drill in her ear until it perforated the brain, but I couldn’t go a week without burying my nose in a woman’s hair, without smelling a woman’s neck, thighs, wrists, armpits. A life without women would be an artificial existence.

“Perfectly.”

“Everything has come to me too late. I’ve never been loved the way I deserve. And I wasn’t even asking for that much. Now I’ll ask for less. I’m going to stay here, not hurting anyone, not making any trouble. I don’t have the balls to set myself on fire, slit my wrists, or jump off a building. Fear is my firewall, and I’m not really so badly off. Then I’ll die and I’ll be nice and dead. And quiet, like a tomato vine.”

I saw the retching movement; I had time to see the shine in his eyes that warned me that he’d lost control. But I’d barely started up when the torrent spread over the floor amid violent groans. It spattered my shoes, it spattered the sofa (my bed), the floor, and his own hands. In two minutes he’d spilled everything; it didn’t even occur to me that he could suffocate. Maybe feminists and anthropologists are right and the planet is overflowing with alpha males, but I only know guys who lack affection.

I got to work. I already cooked for Pedro on an almost daily basis, simple but tasty recipes (grilled chicken breast drizzled in olive oil and garnished with hard-boiled egg; hake boiled with carrot, leek, and onion: it’s not crucial but I recommend putting all the vegetables in the blender and flavoring the puree with the first spice that comes to hand). I’d already helped him unclog the toilet, breathing in the effluvia, the smell of antibiotics rising from the pale and almost colorless yellow liquid; I looked for a bucket and filled it with hot water. I did for him what I hadn’t done for Mother, what I didn’t do for Dad, what I wouldn’t have done (sorry) for you: I mopped up that thick, reddish liquid. Masculinity’s dark hours — heaven forbid you surprise us when we’re alone! I didn’t do a bad job, though not even the dishcloth could absorb the dozen or so solid slivers that had escaped from his stomach. I had to take care of that matter with my fingers.

I went to make him an herbal infusion, and while the water was boiling I found that he had moved back to the sofa and was sleeping with his face wedged against the armrest. I had to turn him over like a sack of potatoes to rescue the blanket he’d draped over the upholstery to stop his guest staining the upholstery with crumbs and grease.

I hadn’t missed his accusation of cradle robbing. You’ll have already realized my arrangement with Pedro was comfortable, but I had more absorbing plans. I was heading down the classic road of sensitive pre-fifty-year-old men: I’d gotten involved with a girl young enough to be your niece. Where does my liaison leave all my jokes about men who break themselves on the treadmill so they can scratch around in a mismatched age group in search of sweet young things? Well, it leaves them wonderfully well placed, because I still don’t think getting old is an abdication: I don’t bleach or dye my hair or spread lotion on my hands. I’m a lived-in specimen, full of practical solutions to specific challenges.

In fact, my adolescent girl (only she wasn’t so adolescent), who depended economically on parents whose surnames were not promising, believed she deserved to be loved like a real woman, and she tried to move in with me on Rocafort. I flatly refused, not only because it was a vice-ridden area, but also because I needed a refuge from her. In two weeks she spilled her entire life all over me: she took me to meet her friends, her girlfriends, her half-boyfriends (people she had kissed), and her rivals both real and imaginary, with whom she maintained contact because they gave her days a helpful touch of spice. And she presented me to them all as if to say: “Look, this is my new world.”

I’m not going to say where we met. I only did it because I felt lonely — I’ve always been married or had a girlfriend, and I missed having someone want to put their arms around me. I didn’t give her any hopes for a shared future; to protect us both I gave her a pack of lies. I think she hadn’t entirely ended things with her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to deprive her permanently of the guy who will be there when everything else collapses.

I liked her because she swung suspended in a limbo of allure, where one day she’d be convinced she was incontestably beautiful, and another she’d be irrationally afraid she was ugly. I liked her because in one short hour she could span every mood; because one day she’d stop smoking, another she’d stop drinking, and the next she’d wear out her shoes, burn her lips, and put her liver to the test. I liked her because she sat atop youth as though she’d conquered it, as though it weren’t a state that would be snatched away so another game could begin. She was going to defend her youth, because it was as much hers as the coffee-colored stain that crossed her face from one cheek to the other, overcoming the bridge of her nose. I liked her because she treated me like I belonged to a different species that had been born into adulthood and couldn’t even guess at the forces and conflicting emotions surging through her. I liked how she pretended to know everything about feelings whose depth and hardness she barely intuited. I liked her because there are girls with wise eyes who know more than they have lived, and she was not one of those girls. I liked her because it’s a luxury to listen to a person who still looks for a rational (even ethical!) justification for her choices, convinced that every impulse springs from a considered decision, and that one day she will finally harmonize that daily tumult into a coherent idea of herself, and I kissed her because all young people are evangelists. I kissed her because I like people and it’s wonderful that their little inner voices never stop. I kissed her even though a kiss meant little to her, because she confused sexual maturity with a list of erotic “experiences” organized according to difficulty: tests that you take and pass and drop like party streamers, never to be picked up again. I liked how she told me she lost her virginity when she was fifteen years and three months old, and that in his urgency the boy had forced her a little and hurt her. She’d developed negative feelings toward penetration and then she gradually overcame them so as not to be left out of life; and although she was almost old (nearly twenty-two), she knew she could achieve something important. I liked how her myopic eyes regarded me when she came out of the shower, and I liked her because out of all that nebulous wealth of women and men she’d decided she preferred males, and out of all the ones she could have chosen to star in the adventure of her life, she’d opted for me.

Of course, if instead of this chatter projected into sterile nothingness I had you here with me, I’d tell you that I’d also slept with women my own age, girlfriends from before. And I’d be careful not to give you her name or Facebook page, where you could easily follow my very first illustrated romance. I took so many photos of her (what am I here for?) and she took so many of me (no comparison) that I stopped thinking of photography as a salvaged instant that years later will help animate lost landscapes of memory. When I saw them arranged on Instagram like cobblestones that don’t leave an inch of earth in sight, the minimal time between the photographs (several hours, a few days, never a week) worked as a spell to create the illusion of seamless continuity.

The gap between what she saw in the photographs and what I saw was one of the many problems that complicated her project of building something stable with me. Ours was a love without roots, without a shared home. If Helen made my heart beat faster, it wasn’t just because of her beauty and youth; it was also because she secreted the same innocence and wonder as the boy I used to be. What I want in my life is her emotion, her fear, her tremor — my safety and confidence embracing her inexperience and doubts, opening doors together. What I want, these young girls can’t give me; age will always come between us.

And though it may be a cheapened idea, I think it would have been good for me to have navigated the decades with a companion who’d known me from the beginning. The sense of responsibility that overwhelmed me when I said good-bye to Mabus was tied to the awareness that when I opened the door to the room in the hotel where Helen and I had tried to rip out each other’s tonsils, I was going to have the most important conversation of my life.

I didn’t go straight upstairs, I needed some fresh air first. The sleepless night, the three times I’d crossed the hotel’s threshold in very different states of mind, the confusion between the boy who lived and didn’t know and the man who tells and knows all there is to know about the things he has experienced — it all cohered into a tense, slippery, hallucinatory scene. I heard the pigs squealing again. They must have been waking up, the beasts are early risers. It felt like one of those undulations of the universe was bringing me close to a different sequence of my own life, and I could touch an episode from the past.

I wasn’t even three feet tall. We’d just come back from some excursion of which I remember only the road, the ruts from the wheels, and the ditches infested with thistles and sunflowers. Mother was watching over my sister, but her eyes only swelled with love when they turned to her son, playing as usual with the maroon ball until the darkness hid the basket from me. It wasn’t fair, but Mother had placed the better part of her love in her male offspring, so I felt no distrust when she told me, while she stirred a red infusion:

“Tomorrow is hog day, you’ll enjoy it. It’s in the barn.”

I wasn’t even put off by the wild, earth-colored cats, or the vivid suspicion that if my father had been there and not in one of the other places adults went without telling you, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to take me to a barn to see a hog. There was a time when it was enough that I just give my all, and things were fine; that time is gone, but it did exist.

I didn’t know the person they chose to take me. The two of us went in a truck, it was dusk, and since the man scared me, I concentrated on watching out the window as the little villages along the roadside gradually condensed into smatterings of electric light: they shone like the stars at night. The man only broke the silence when the farmyard’s outline appeared. The flagstones in the barn smelled of dry grass, of vegetable things, bitter and rancid. On the floor (lit by the sun’s last rays — there was a tear in the curtain), I saw viscous impregnations with the texture of bitumen, almost no shine. While we were waiting for whatever we were waiting for, some adults came in with buckets. I’d never seen two men wielding rags; they scrubbed with a solution of water and bleach, but they weren’t really serious about washing whatever it was off the floor. They just sloshed it around and diluted it.

Then we heard the piercing squeals of the pig.

They dragged it in between four or five men. The hog moved fast on those sickly little legs that could barely carry it, so worked up that its belly brushed against the ground. It realized very quickly that things weren’t going well. Those creatures aren’t idiots like cows or ducks, they have mature brains, and when they smell the blood of other hogs spread over the floor they go mad, you really have to fight to hold them down. These days they use a pistol that shoots compressed air and destroys the neural tissue instantly. I saw it one night, years later, over seven years ago: the pig shrieks like a chain saw and shits itself from struggling so much, but it’s cleaner than slitting its throat and waiting for the avalanche of viscera and mucous to finish falling through the gaping wound. We stayed there for some minutes. Another adult, among the many there, assured me the pig was no longer suffering. But its eyes were flickering, suspended, as if they were forcing it to lie there looking into the abyss. It seemed mute, but only because the flesh of its throat was bleeding out into the sand.

I went outside, and what I did there was play. Back then it was always playing, even if I only sat still.

When I got bored with playing, I peered in through the barn’s window.

They still had work to do with what remained of the pig. That beast might have weighed as much as four adult humans, maybe half a ton. The proteins in its brain hadn’t gotten used to being dead, and were sending chemical flashes to its muscles. The whole pink mass contracted in spasms, but the men didn’t appear to be at all afraid of that pig’s nervous ghost. They were strong, they were healthy, they were loud when they drank, they were nothing like my father. What could possibly frighten them? There was nothing left of the hog as such, it was just meat and lard. Death was something that left scraps behind. You could cut them, pound them remorselessly; death gave you an absolute power, and it left its victim entirely defenseless.

I know that they put an iron hook through the opening in its neck and that its tongue fell spongily out, flat like a sole fish. Its thick hide sagged to the ground (I had eaten it, but I still hadn’t seen it twist and wither in hot oil, I hadn’t associated it with anything living), and on its fatty inside were fluorescent bubbles, different from the oily veins of industrial bacon. I don’t know if what they did with the water spurting from the hose could be called cleaning; the ground was still covered with muck that was darker and shinier than the usual filth. They were juices and tissues of the type required to keep life on its feet, and now there they were, exposed on the floor of the barn.

I know they scorched the animal to get rid of its stiff hair. I know that once it was hot they pulled off its hooves. I know they cleaned it using cork. I know they pulled out its guts and organs. I know they cut it from top to bottom along the spinal column, that they left it hanging for the white and bloody meat to cure, that they extracted its ribs, its backbone, and its loins, which they cut up into strips of meat. And I know that among the entrails floating in a bucket of ice water, I saw the pig’s heart. It was the same color of concentrated blood as the raw kidneys that I’ve never again put in my mouth, but triple the size of the little rabbit hearts you could break out of their membrane with your fingers and toss in the bin.

Two months later, I got onto a bus, my knees grass-stained and the ball hidden away in a backpack. I got off a little before the last stop and I left the ball in an empty field the neighbors used for parking, where garbage rotted and cottony rounds woven of vegetation and dust rolled by, looking like desiccated animal carcasses. I felt lighter on the way back. Every time I’d stumbled over that garnet-colored ball, I’d imagined the enormous, beating organ stuck in the middle of the hog’s hulking body: a muscular pump designed to distribute blood to its extremities, to its pig organs, to its glands.

I stood there admiring that knot of fibers in the bucket. If no one did anything, it would start to dry out in a few hours. And who was going to take the time to keep it moist? I went closer to the window; floating particles were turning the water murky. Living bodies are strange inside, they have galleries, caves, arches, and domes. They’re wet. Even if they let me take the pieces out of the bucket, I couldn’t put them back together; no matter how hard you concentrate in class, living things can’t be reassembled once they’re broken. I know my attention was caught by the fine and firm veins of fat, which struck me then as a frame to support the maroon pulp. Years have passed, and I’ve come to think of them as the marks that a lifetime of lashes had opened in the flesh.

So, as I was saying, I climbed the hotel stairs briskly, convinced I was about to untangle an annoying knot so that life could unfurl once and for all toward my authentic future: the easy life. I opened the door with a kick (I thought the surprise would work in my favor), and I found Helen kneeling on the floor with her face painted vermilion. She’d used the same thick, organic red to draw on the wall the outline she used to represent her Daddy (her fingerprints were stamped where the line curved to change direction). Sure, I saw the stains on the floor; it was just that I wondered at first where that maniac had gotten hold of paint — maybe they’d given her a bottle of ketchup in the kitchen? It was just that the window was open and a fresh, pleasant breeze was blowing in; it was just that it took me a few seconds to orient my brain in the correct, delirious, abject direction: her own body had supplied the paint, she’d extracted it from inside herself.

I had to concentrate on curbing the oily, nauseating taste that made me shudder as it traced a rising arc up my esophagus. I leaned against the wall to let the shudders of disgust pass. Helen was still kneeling on the floor, invoking in her little voice forces that weren’t going to save us, her face smeared with menstrual blood: a magic philter to retain the lover whose back she’d broken.

“What are you doing? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Shut up, get out of here, you couldn’t begin to understand. This is too personal and spiritual for an animal like you, you’re just a collection of missing pieces.”

And if you stop to think about it, blood is already pretty mysterious in itself. There you have it, spinning through your veins, irrigating organs and tissues, drenching them in vitamins and iron; you find it in birds, you won’t believe how fish bleed, even those shitty little insects less than a centimeter long have their drop to defend; a baby is born covered in blood, and it is blood that congeals in the arteries of corpses. It’s a vital juice we pass on, generation after generation, a scarlet thread that traces the figure of life inside the body. You could write a good book with an idea like that. We’d watched the video together, eating popcorn, entwined on the sofa (how you would disapprove of the new domestic habits, Dad) while on the screen Jovanotti spouted off about how women were creatures who bled, and men trained them to be ashamed of their cycles, their processes, their phases, their…well, you can add any idiotic word you like, take your pick. And, unperturbed by so much crudeness, he added that with the nutrients of fecundation that went unused every month any woman could put right broken relationships, or get rid of traumas so deeply rooted they can’t be torn out without irreparable harm. Naturally, my reaction was to laugh in that fraud’s face, and because I heard her laughing I thought Helen was following my lead. But it seems her feet were dragging her in the direction of magical, fantastical thinking, toward the marvelous catalogue of easy answers: spells and charms.

“I don’t think we came here for these demented tricks. I, for one, came because I believed in us. I still believed. I came for love.”

She replied with some whistling noises; I suppose the ritual continued apace. And at this point it’s sorely tempting to put Helen in a clinical category and expel her from the ranks of the sane. It wouldn’t be the first time — her silky buttocks had experienced being kicked. But it isn’t that easy, of course. If you counted all the men who knock on wood, and girls who leave the house carrying magic stones, convinced that the future leaves signs etched into the constellations, you’d come up with a seven-digit number, and I refuse to believe that those millions are all cuckoo. This huge, intricate machine we’re hurled into and expected to find our way in is too confusing, stubborn, and volatile to interpret with scientifically approved theories or ideas handed down to us by our parents; it does us all good to wield a daring hypothesis or two. Personally, I believe in sympathetic telepathy and in vitamin C’s influence on love. Helen’s concoction was lower quality; it included more irrational bullshit than mine did, that was all. I’m just saying that Helen hadn’t come up with her bloody ritual in an injured area of her brain; Jovanotti had whispered it to her via the prestigious channels of public radio and private television. Helen was only a silly creature trying to do things right. How could I hold that against her?

“Touch me and I’ll kill you.”

I hadn’t moved with any intention of touching her, but that warning acted as a map of where to channel the indignation burning my hands. I grabbed her arms and dragged her to the bathroom, leaving her sprawled while I adjusted the water in the shower. When I pulled off her shirt she started to struggle, but without conviction, as if she wanted neither to surrender nor conquer, as if my violence were the force she’d been trying to invoke all along. I stuck her face under the water and cleaned her lips and teeth and her armpits and belly, I lathered her all over. The drain wasn’t working well, and I saw a pinkish substance swirling, the color of guts, crowned with rapids and crests of foam. I didn’t let go of her neck, just in case.

It’s funny (mind you, “funny” isn’t exactly the word, but the moment didn’t lend itself to finding a better one) how we can call up the past in a fixed image and leave it frozen on the mind’s projector screen, preventing time from speeding it up. To remember is like passing those images one after another, scrutinizing them, altering their color, classifying them. In one, I drag Helen out of the bathroom, in another I throw her onto the bed, confident in my superior strength, then I throw myself onto her and I hear her face (an expression of vague repulsion marbled with veins of outrage and impotence) repeat in a thread of a voice:

“Touch me and I’ll kill you.”

While I thrust into her viciously, it seemed to me that a little gray figure that could only be the shadow of my father was projected onto the wall; he was trying to communicate to me from the other side (I liked that euphemism because it left open the hope of a return) his manly advice on how to dominate a marriage, which he’d never dared to impart in life. Because while he was alive, the most valuable guidance he managed to transmit (and that I assimilated, though it went against the current of my actions) was what could be taken from that little man’s daily habits (the father of my flesh, who breakfasted each morning on buttered toast and went down to Balmes to buy himself a beige handkerchief): the conventional search for moderation. But in the end you flew the coop, Dad, living in secret, taking care of Mother on the sly. If you’re going to tell me something in an attempt to cover the open wound at the heart of your marriage, I’m not sure I want to hear it, and nor did you arrive in time to straighten out what I had with Helen. Even if she grabbed my back (her finger on my scar) as we surrendered ourselves lasciviously, neither of us expected any sweet words. I felt her tremble and emerge from the trance and we broke apart, she moved away and turned over, and I heard her breathing beneath the mass of messy hair. When I recognized the pink mark of my hand on her opulent buttocks, my body felt filled with a kind of paste, disgust for both of us, a final feeling. It occurred to me to reach out and caress her, but the impulse went no further.

The last thing I saw before falling asleep (it was dark, but my pupils managed to take in loose fibers of light) was enough clothing to fill a clothesline, two toppled chairs, and part of the sheet that had fallen off the bed, which from where I lay looked like a mass of flesh determined to flee its body and spill over the floor. Beside me a hot body slept, a little weepy, a bit of torn skin.

Somehow while I was sleeping the swell of light advanced surreptitiously from the globe’s antipodes until its luminous froth poured over the horizon. I missed seeing it open the first narcissus and set the lower plains on fire, and how it slipped like an innuendo among the resort’s fronds. I was sleeping the sleep of satisfied mammals. I opened my eyelids slowly and closed them again. Some words spoken during that endless night of struggle shamed me, but let’s not exaggerate: the innermost caverns of my body, which so often felt more spacious than they looked from the outside, were oozing serenity. I opened my eyes in a room invaded by southern light, bathed by a delicate atmosphere of feminine aromas; I even felt the soft tug of arousal and a gnawing hunger. Nothing a kiss and some yogurt couldn’t fix.

But Helen wasn’t there.

This time she’d taken her suitcase, collected all her clothes; maybe she was serious.

I didn’t leap out of bed, didn’t get dressed in a hurry or run barefoot into the corridor to look for her. I didn’t care. I brushed my teeth, urinated, took a really good shower and let the water slide over the skin of my arms, my fingers lathering my hair into foamy crests; I even burst into song. I came out of the bathroom with a pygmy-sized towel tied around my waist, showing half a buttock that in the room’s mirror assumed demotic proportions; how grand I felt. Through the window, two creamy clouds were sliding imperceptibly past. It was like I’d taken off a pair of glasses that had muted all the colors, like rediscovering a brilliant landscape, shimmering, full of just-wet shades; it was like my heart and my brain had broken away from a network of parasitic nerves and veins. That scent of living moss and vegetation came from the miracle of falling out of love.

I was optimistic and full of verve like a pony released from its bridle, half crazed at the sight of an open field washed by hopeful breezes, my tendons twitching with vitality. I put on the suit fit for a diplomat that I’d brought just in case, and in honor of Dad I folded a silk scarf around the open neck of my periwinkle shirt. The outfit made me look like a country squire nervous about attending the theater, but it wasn’t out of place among the mummies. Plus, there were my chin, my dimples, my mat of springy hair, my eyes with their noble clarity, all bestowing a little beauty on the humans who laid eyes on me.

I went down the stairs convinced that the sex we’d had, so hard-fought (the final fight with Helen), so aggressive, so sad, so satisfactory as a form of physical relief, was a good symbolic summary of our marriage: we had no more to give. At reception I stocked up on salty peanuts and inquired after Jack Mabus, the only man to whom I could confide the ending of my story. I was afraid that if I kept it in, it would turn sour; I wanted to say it and expel it, dissolve it in the immensity of the shared world.

“Mr. Mabus left this morning.”

I figured Helen had gone back to Barcelona, or that she’d locked herself in her parents’ room, or headed out on a hike among the cornfields; I imagined her enthusiastically looking at some fissured figs with red pulp, who knows? The only certainty was that just then, not only was Jack Mabus headed away from the resort at the speed of his chosen means of transportation, but Jackson and his grandparents were also packing their suitcases en route to the far-flung fields of Montana. So I had the sort of scare that can make your hair fall out when the receptionist pointed mutely down the corridor toward Daddy Rupert’s sagging body. He’d tried to call my room, he’d been waiting two hours for me, so soft and livid that if it weren’t too obvious a joke I’d say that the health spa was killing him.

He invited me to sit with him on the terrace. It was an emotionally charged scene; half an hour earlier I’d been sure I was free of Helen. A man can convince himself of incredible things when he’s singing naked in a hotel room (you should try it), but I guess two out of every three of my heartbeats were still pumping blood bewitched by the daughter of the Thrush clan. It’s no easy business to clean one’s matter, to sterilize it, expel the final atoms of shared expectations. In the end, I had to have a talk with the decrepit incarnation of the man responsible for the bestial daily life I’d enjoyed for the past year, the scoundrel who’d turned Helen’s spirit bitter with his inflexible gender preferences, the same man I wanted to see flayed alive every time my wife crawled back over our emotional garbage. It’s no surprise my leg was trembling.

He ordered a chamomile tea, and I decided it would be too much to ask if they could make me a gin and tonic. In the creases of his debilitated face shone cold, metallic irises; he smiled at me belligerently, pulled up a sock. The other was down around his ankle: my empty stomach fought back a heave when I saw that naked shin, pale and thick like those noodles the Japanese eat.

“Helen told us everything. My daughter is ready to charge you with rape, but she won’t do anything without our support. And we won’t support her in a case she’ll never win and that will only keep her chained to you. For all I know, that’s her motivation. What we are asking for is an effort on your part to get a fast divorce. The airline has had the courtesy to change the name on my ticket — the Spanish never kick up a fuss if you show them an American passport. The boy will leave with his mother and grandmother. The climate in this town suits me, and in three or four days we can have all the paperwork for your separation finished. Given the circumstances, it would be quite surprising if a gentleman like you, sir, were to start making strange requests now.”

He managed to say it all in Spanish with just a few supporting words in English. He had planned the speech, and made no effort to hide the currents of apathy swirling under his general feeling of relief at putting an end, once and for all, to his daughter’s disastrous Latin phase (which at least he’d come out of without another grandchild). He seemed more interested when he heard the sound of pigs grunting, turning his head from side to side, looking for the animals. Rupert put both hands on the table and tried to stand up; when he managed it, slightly hunched over, he was roughly the same size as Dad. Though, of course, Dad would never have stooped to wearing those Bermuda shorts.

“Why didn’t you love her?” I asked.

Rupert hadn’t given his deposed son-in-law a single line in his script, so my reply cracked the scene he’d anticipated and we were left to improvise: two people born in different decades, thousands of kilometers apart, whose trajectories would never have coincided were it not for the fact that men engender daughters in the bodies of women, and other men fall in love with those daughters, and that fluke muddles the expectations of the present into an unknowable future.

I think they came squealing out of the forest: three piggy Zeppelins. They skirted the pool like greased lightning and crossed the terrace toppling chairs in their wake. The pursuing gang of waiters struggled with them on the grass until they finally got the animals tied up. They dragged the pigs away through the pines along a hidden path.

“They’re females. Males are too big to be held down by two people. Smart animals. I owe them a lot.”

I tuned out. I wasn’t there to listen to the melancholic doddering of an old man whose only known skills were driving vans, taking care of Beryl (he of the model planes), and shredding his daughter’s nerves. But Daddy kept going.

“One of their species donated tissue for my transplant.”

I’d heard something about that before, how the human heart’s fragile fibers can be propped up by the pig’s tough cells. Of course, in those days, maladies that required surgery sounded like distant music to me. It’s only now that I’ve started to worry about whether the influx of porcine molecules is mutating us into a hybrid race. Or does it seem normal to you that Rupert was walking around with a hog’s ventricle?

“It’s funny that even after being married to her, you don’t see that my daughter is a little…excessive. A girl in love with her problems, which to be honest have never been all that serious. Helen doesn’t let her wounds heal, she doesn’t forget any reason she has to feel offended and lets them build up day after day; you’re always beholden to her. Behind her low self-esteem is a hidden, unspeakable pride, and not much more. I gave her affection, an education, and we never abandoned her, not even when she left behind an unwanted child and took off to gad about on another continent with a man who doesn’t even understand her.”

He said all this in English, not even looking at me. To him I was like an isolated element in a solved equation that no longer offered any intellectual stimulation. It was only as I watched him hobble away that responses, accusations, and reproaches came bubbling up from I don’t know what depths of my mind, accumulating behind my forehead. I could chase him, I could force him to come back and listen to me (I still had strength on my side), but I did none of that; I stayed sitting there quietly, with my English handkerchief and my silk scarf. I raised my hand but no waiter appeared, the light fell in raw columns between cracks in the atmosphere; I cooled off and realized I was sick of arguing. How fast adult life moves: I never saw Helen again, they no longer give me a basket and ball to measure my good fortune, it’s never about winning or losing anymore.

I had three more days ahead of me. I could leave, what was keeping me? But the wasted money hurt. I didn’t want to flee like a rat, I wanted to spend the hours ahead forgetting myself in the wave pool. Rupert’s reprimand had been like a refreshing shower. I missed having someone put me in my place. If not for the dismal prospect of moving to Montana, I would have let Daddy adopt me.

I went to bed early. I fell asleep plowing through foggy torrents of alcohol, wondering if sons are still sons once they’re orphaned, so I was startled when the phone in my room started ringing at four in the morning. It didn’t help that I confused the ringing with the fire alarm; Cataluña is prone to summer wildfires, and we were boxed in a shallow valley, so it’s understandable (and forgivable) that I was relieved when I understood that the cavernous voice was referring to Rupert. “Your father-in-law” was the repeated subject of a riot of predicate nouns: “serious collapse,” “coronary attack,” “muscular paralysis.” I got dressed freestyle without considering colors or fabrics (I went out in mismatched socks, in scuffed shoes), everything reflecting my state of mind, still sticky with sleep, and when I entered room 601 I remembered that, according to the civil laws of the City of Madrid, I was the only relative Rupert had on the peninsula.

The doctor (a gorgeous, ruddy-cheeked rural specimen, with lines on his forehead from rolling up his barretina cap) brought me up to speed on the series of heart attacks during the night that had left Rupert disoriented and with just enough strength to call for help. He needed oxygen and saline, and it wasn’t out of the question that the macrophages, overflowing with lipids, fat, and cholesterol, would block another vein. It was best to transport him to the local hospital and start sawing him up (he didn’t use that verb) to unclog the veins, because Dr. Capri didn’t have the resources at the spa — the center’s first aid and medical facility were a bit of a joke. I’m not one of those weirdos who see words in colors, but the doctor’s next sentence flashed golden as it was projected in my imagination:

“I need you to authorize his hospitalization.”

“I need to be alone with him.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“It’ll just be a moment, I only need a moment.”

The Joan-Marc with his health compromised by trail mix and potato chips saturated in corrosive fats would have felt solidarity with that Rupert who was unable to support the weight of his own body: it strikes me, too, that it was a real mistake to make an organ as important as the heart unable to store oxygen for when the need arises, so its demand is continuous. But what I experienced that day, once I was alone with that man into whose nostrils they’d stuck thick tubes like organic tentacles, was an invigorating power, an extra dose of manliness. The strength he’d had during our conversation, not to mention the touch of aggression, had vanished. The bird that watched me from that damp bed was just a scared old man with a rubber tube between his lips, which his tongue and uvula palpated shamelessly.

And don’t get the idea I planned to strangle him. I wouldn’t have had the nerve. All I did was pull the sheet off him; he smelled of dust, wax, and something else. The skin of his feet was hard like a rind, his blood had congealed in several dark spots of livid ink. He had the same hard and spongy calluses as Dad. My next step was to dig around in his suitcase — he tried to stop me from burgling him with some utterly impotent mutterings. Anyway, I had the medical establishment on my side, as well as a long history of abusive legal precedents against the wishes of defenseless patients. I took his wallet, a mobile phone, his pillbox, and an envelope holding three letters. It was a lot like having your rival’s guts in your hands. Then I signed all the papers they put in front of me — as far as I was concerned, they could steal his organs.

In the ambulance I entertained myself by going through Rupert’s phone, which of course wasn’t the kind of pocket computer we haul around with us these days, but it did have a little camera. I looked through the photos and I found his grandson and Helen, shots of the house and of license plates (every man has his photographic perversions). His wife must not have known how to work the thing, because Rupert had also saved photos of a plump and uninhibited blonde a bit older than me, who wore jeans that the word “tight” was a little baggy on. Rupert smiled in front of urban backgrounds (Boston, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay) or landscapes that could be anywhere (cacti, sand, bald patches of earth), and the sequence of little poses culminated in an orthopedic kiss in front of a replica Statue of Liberty. The blurry quality of the pictures lowered those occasions to the category of half-developed memories, ones that have neither dissolved entirely nor been integrated into the series of shining moments that constitute the public profiles of our lives.

They untied him, propped him up in a wheelchair, stuck him in a room. They took off his clothes, shaved him, tied him down again so he wouldn’t be tempted to fall off, and told him that in half an hour they would sedate him. Rupert, though, was only babbling away in fragments of German left over from God knows what remote period of his life.

If you think about what he was going through, Rupert’s gaze was pretty calm. His composure reminded me of my father’s levelheadedness when he was alive (because when he hanged himself his eyes had gone crooked): they both belonged to a generation that didn’t deal with problems by shouting, men constrained by modesty, no chicken feathers on them. I should have hated him, but hate is hard to muster when your enemy is swelling up like a drowned corpse. I’d actually been feeling friendly toward the old coot — call it fellow feeling, or masculine solidarity if you prefer. Maybe Helen’s parents had also intended to fix their relationship with a trip to that resort, give it another shot before heading off to the grave. It must be sad to grow bitter when there’s so little time before they’re spreading your ashes over a field of violets. Daddy had opted for his wife, and he saved the photos only out of pride, or nostalgia, the kind of complacent contradiction you’ll find circulating in the brains of the living.

I was already getting overly solemn when Rupert started emitting that teakettle sound. An invisible force was racking him like he was a cardboard doll, you could almost hear him crunch; Daddy was truly battling death. An aroma of reheated resin and flannel suits wafted in. I dialed Helen’s number but she still didn’t answer, convinced that a Spanish prefix could only portend her Latin rapist. Dad had also been alone when he climbed up onto the stool with the cable (I hadn’t told you that part — he looped half a meter of antenna cable around his neck: copper sheathed in rubber). I called the doctors in and they took him to emergency, on the floor for coronary patients, and somehow we ended up on a ward for the terminally ill. In the room with us were other crustaceans, in whose eyes you could still see a sliver of spirit, the last flash of conscious activity. For years I had silently given thanks (fighting to evade regrets, to dry them out in the sun of new events before they permeated me) that my father had saved me the horror of watching him ebb away slowly in a synthetic bed, perforated like a voodoo doll. In spite of all the hours I’d lived alongside him, not to mention my familiarity with his intestinal rhythms, the ordeal of accompanying him into that unknown would have been too much for me to bear.

I took Rupert’s pulse, and the smell on his arm was Chypre cologne, Dad’s favorite. Of course, I wasn’t fooling myself; the heart has its doubts but there are lessons we must learn: when we come into the world our parents are there to teach us how to live, but then they die before we learn the painful reverse birth by which we leave the earth. I wouldn’t be spared; I was inside death’s magnetic field again. In the light of that emotional impotence, the antagonism between the old horse and the pony, between the father and his son-in-law, was blunted. That I was keeping him company during his final earthly hours as a symbolic payback for having been spared Dad’s sufferings stopped being a crazy idea. It was just a difficult one, the kind we’ve grown used to after so many unforeseen events, coincidences, and randomness.

So it was Dad, using the transitory body of old Daddy Rupert (with his flowery Bermudas in the suitcase, his network of dirty veins, and the harshness with which a nurse with absurd hips removed the oxygen mask to brush his teeth), who taught me how life’s dynamics humiliate us, how our cells vanish one after another, how no one leaves this world alive.

I leaned over Rupert’s body and I spoke to Dad. That gaping mouth now could only be a tube whose other end opened onto the Great Beyond. And I told him (though I’ll deny it if ever anyone hints I could think something like this) that when he left that financial mess sandwiched in a file he had behaved like a pig. To love someone is to want them to go on being, and that tawdry suicide made it very clear that he wiped his ass with our love.

“You showed your true colors, Dad!”

Rupert started to gasp. Only it wasn’t Rupert, it was Dad’s shade trying to answer me, to communicate a message, to respond to my words. But the language of the dead is cold and hard to understand, it’s articulated in broken syntax, and I couldn’t decipher what Dad was trying to say to me in that suffocated murmur. The temperature of the deceased, everything they’ve lost, is pitiful, so I buried my reproaches down deep.

I wondered what good could come to Rupert from taking leave of life in the company of a son-in-law who detested him and who didn’t understand a word of his incoherent German, but I had to set aside those charitable thoughts when the third attack began. Since I didn’t know what people die of — how could I know? with so many pig cells, maybe he was growing a snout — I started shouting for the nurses. And while Rupert’s throat was filling with blood, he looked at me and in his two little eyes shone something dense and indefinable: the point of lucidity that struggles against the end. I felt so sorry for him that I hugged him and shouted:

“Rudolf, it’s Beryl, your brother! You won’t die alone!”

I took the road to the resort for the last time, intending to retrieve the luggage. The floor was covered in streamers and confetti, but the old folks must have been off stretching their carcasses or moving their arms in the pool. I challenged some of the minibar charges, knowing full well I wasn’t in the right, and I cast a last look at the water in the pool, a blue hide wrinkled by the same wind that had dispersed the clouds to spread above me an open sky, dumb and maliciously yellow. Four more documents in the separation process and I would have been free of the Thrushes. I turned off toward the farm. The yard around the pigs wasn’t in good shape: the grass curved drily, the ground didn’t give it enough water, a white fuzz was growing on the tree trunks. The greenery over near the road looked hard and contemptuous, but I was moved at the sight of a majestic tree covered in white flowers that defied the season: the buds were so open that the wind swirled them in small eddies as it pulled them off. I was young, and the timid minutes dancing before me would open into spacious years, a wide and shining time in my life that would be fresh and good.

I left the twisted river behind and started driving with no destination in mind. A savage energy spurred me faster around the curves; I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself. My mind was performing a last dance with Helen, she in the green dress and me in a bluish suede jacket, both of us laughing hard, our faces reflected in the crystal glassware scattered around Bicente’s apartment. Through the windows shone a reddish light that fell over the treetops of Retiro; Helen’s skin exuded the warm glow of grand occasions and we kissed, happy to have met each other, and to never see each other again.

I parked the car on a bend where the cliff overlooked the valley. If I squinted, those dotted rural houses could be taken for dice scattered randomly under a lemony light. I rolled up my shirtsleeves (they were too long) and leaned against the chassis; I hadn’t turned the engine off, I liked to feel it vibrate. It must have taken a lot of energy to excavate that fissure between the hills, not to mention patient long-term planning, waiting thousands of years for the meltwaters to erode the earth until it finally molded the valley where, at that sunset, a handful of men turned on their lights below my young, eager gaze, illuminating the little plots of land that coincided with their notion of home.

I took out Rupert’s letters. My plan was to destroy them without reading them. However, though I no longer thought of myself as his adversary, or felt I held in my hands the entrails of the man who did so much to corrupt my first attempt at happiness, I was too full of life and curiosity to let that fountain run dry. I wanted more, I felt I was capable of devouring the world; we’re just passing through, we breathe for a time, we want to win, we don’t know how to quell the desire, and no one wants to.

The last time I thought about those letters (an insignificant stream of demands from the woman that clearly showed Rupert had ended the affair, and badly) was when I left Pedro-María’s place, the night of Sónar. The accusations of some woman I’d never even seen got mixed up with the story of Cris, of Isabel, of my black year living with Helen, with my asymmetrical, futureless mess, and with you (with you, of course), and it was like following a trail of virile suffering, of overflowing masculinity. The morning broke charmless; I didn’t want understanding or support, nor did I feel like walking home or going down into the metro. The last night buses smell like armpits and the toxic substance they spray to make the smell less noticeable, and the people who ride them are so worn out it makes my soul ache. I saw the taxi’s green light approaching and I deployed the elegant gesture that cabdrivers the world over respond to by braking. I opened the door, composing an aristocratic face in greeting. I was still furious at you, and thinking about Helen wasn’t helping, but a playful mood danced in my chest.

“I’ve got forty euros, take a spin for that price and end the trip on Rocafort. The Adam nightclub.”

“Sure. Are you an actor, by any chance?”

“Do actors ask you to do that a lot?”

“You see a bit of everything at night around here. Are you a musician? Trying to calm down? I can suggest better places than that. You seem like a man of good taste, sir, are you one of those five-star chefs?”

“Warm. Are you from here?”

“From Barcelona? No — as if. I’m a transplant. My parents are from Zaragoza.”

“The one and only. I had a friend in Murcia, he worked for El Adelantado or La Atalaya, something like that. He didn’t want to come to Barcelona because he was scared of the Catalan. How silly, has anyone ever gotten out of your cab because you didn’t ask where they were going in Catalan?”

“Well now, truth is they haven’t.”

“The language, the sardana, those nationalists are always going on about the same shit. But no one warns newcomers about the real dangers in this city. I told him: ‘Pedro’—because my friend’s name is Pedro—‘if you like girls, welcome to paradise.’ ”

“But that’s a good thing.”

“Do you mind if I speak frankly? Taxis are perfect for confessions. What this excess of women leads to is lust, amour fou, and that emotional turbulence is dangerous. There are some great books, scientific and literary ones, about this. It’s hermaphroditic species that are the advanced ones. Let’s take another turn.”

“Should I take the Ronda?”

“As you like. Are you married?”

“Divorced.”

“So things haven’t gone well. Perched in the back here like chickens I bet they look so pleased with themselves, showing off their youth and beauty as if those qualities were theirs forever, and not something they have to gradually trade in. When they feel your eyes on their little bodies, and that hair they work so hard on and soak in so many chemicals, and their carefully exposed curves — you can’t deny that we men are more elegant and discreet about our attributes — they seem so distant, raised up to a higher plane, like they’re the ones in the driver’s seat. But you know what you’d find if you looked closely, if you penetrated their little moral consciences?”

“Well, when you put it that way—”

“What did you do this morning when you left the house?”

“I went to the store to buy a pack of—”

“Then I’m sure you’ve seen her. I mean the cashier who in the middle of an order turns a furious face to the mirror just to be sure the crust of makeup is thick enough to hide the craters in her skin. I’m sure you saw one or two of those old women — they’re like noxious warnings, covered with wrinkles and folds. The young girls see them, too, but do you think they identify with them? Not a chance. There you have them: painted, dressed, fixed up, hair done, fighting to hold one more gaze for a second longer, their heads teeming with local and international contests for the house and the car, for the best ass and the second home and the bank account, going up against their cousins, sisters-in-law, neighbors, and colleagues. And they always hitch their wagon to the same donkey in all those races: the boyfriend, the lover, the husband, the hometown idol. This afternoon, after closing up at the practice, I crossed paths with one of them, clutching her protector’s arm. She looked at me with those dreamy little eyes I know only too well — they’re all the same species, you can ask any geneticist. They notice only the breadth of my shoulders, my full head of hair, and when these impressions are transmitted to their brain, they trigger the primitive response that identifies me as a healthy inseminator, fit for the daily struggle, and they fill my splendid carcass with their fantasies. In this city, if you’re over five foot eleven and you keep your waist down to a thirty-four, you’re going to be lusted after every day by women who don’t know you, and who haven’t learned to detect in you the same habits (messiness, procrastination) that make them badger their men at home nonstop. The youngest, the ugly ones, the ones who get old (OK, they all get old), they’re all united by a common force: the dream of attracting a man, of being courted and enticed with gifts. They’re convinced that the love they feel for themselves can spill out over other people, to dominate them and win their favor, that the trick of love will be enough to control life. Has controlling life ever occurred to you? Why would we ever think about controlling life?”

“Hang on, I’ve got it…psychologist?”

“You’re a real sage, very perceptive.”

“Like I said, you see it all in the taxi.”

“But you didn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. I’ll give you a clue: in my line of work we see only the one thing, over and over, though of course it’s the most important thing in creation.”

“Physicist?”

“Gynecologist. Doctor Bicente. Gay clubs are the only places I can take a break from my work — they’re philanthropic spaces.”

“I understand, sir. My name is Carlos. I like girls, too.”

“Intimate and professional contact with the Mystery has changed my relationship with life, Carlos. People, even married people, forget that every woman on earth has one, that they all carry around that little oven for the seed to go in, and nine months later they expel little people. Little, live people. You see that girl who’s about to fall off her high heels? She’s got one, and that woman reaching her hand in her bag for some cosmetic minion, she’s got another, and those two crossing on the red light, assuming you won’t speed up and run them over, they’ve got one each. From the moment they’re born until they die they all have a model for peeing, for fucking, just to have it and do whatever it is they do with it: their personal care, their hygiene, their bleeding, wetness, dryness…they’re even contradictory in that. When you are forced to think about it professionally, when the cunt becomes, so to speak, your office, your perspective changes, the way you approach life. If you aren’t careful you can go crazy.”

“I understand. But it seems strange. At the stand, while we wait for customers, we talk about a lot of things. Sometimes we think about other jobs, and yours has always seemed like a fun one.”

“Fun? I’m sure when you’re with those brutes you use different words, but I appreciate that you don’t want to hurt me.”

“You can’t deny that you must have moments…”

“No, Carlos, forget about the women you cart around, they’re irrelevant. What do you think they are? Women. Just women. There are three billion of them, for the love of God. They didn’t decide to be women, they don’t think about it. The amazing thing is that open wound in their flesh, its design. Have you ever cut into the lobe of a dog’s ear? It ends up with a hole in the skin, a crater. It’s the same concept. Evolution may be lazy, but it worked with some sense of beauty. The important thing, the relevant thing, isn’t the organism that surrounds it and has a name, the nature of all that blah blah blah; the important thing is what’s seething inside them as soon as you move aside the labial sucker, all those bacteria, defenses, fluids, and ruptures.”

“I don’t know that we’re on the same page, boss.”

“You know what happens when you look at one closely, concentrating all your faculties? Doctor Bicente will tell you the truth: some strange edges like flaps surrounding the void, a dark pipe from which the skull emerges first, then the trunk and the little legs and the feet with those sad baby toes, a complete ensemble all covered in a nourishing mucous. A child is an organ, Carlos, an organ that has come from the mother and slid out through the wetness to claim its independence. Have you ever seen a chicken farm? Don’t miss it, man. Take the kids to one this weekend, or whenever you’re free. The chickens are in their pens, narrow little cages, and the poor things must think they were put there to see and to live life, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, their mission is to lay eggs, white or brown ones, all of them dirty. If you put those chickens next to some Bozeman forceps — the idea of the chickens next to the idea of the forceps, you don’t need to bring forceps to the farm — you’ll never think of a city the same way again. Look out the window, what do you see? A city infested with lights, theaters, restaurants so ethnic they’ll start allowing cannibal dishes as exotic cuisine any day now. Jewelry, champagne, that’s how we distract ourselves. Think of the pregnant women who get into your cab: flesh wrapped in flesh. Cities are giant birthing grounds, human-being farms, nurseries where some genes are incubated and others expelled so the species can continue apace, so nature can safeguard consciousness, its little mirror, its favorite toy, much more elaborate than the tortoises and chimpanzees. You’ll only hear this from a gynecologist. Only someone like me could know. That’s why they don’t invite us on TV: we are reality tutors. Even if it hurts, a gynecologist will always tell you the truth.”

“I hear you.”

“And the truth is that, when they aren’t giving birth, that whole tide of out-of-control women is like an infection. I won’t tell you they’re all crazy, you won’t hear that from Doctor Bicente, because I’m a lover of precision and confirmed data, and statistics are lacking when it comes to women, Arabs, and the Eskimos who spend the day cleaning fish with their teeth. But in our cities it doesn’t matter if the newspapers plaster their front pages with sporting triumphs or the latest about the supposed crisis — what do those political clowns matter to us! Go to a cinema, go to a shopping center, get on the metro, line up to buy two tickets to the stadium, pay attention to the workers, to the couples going out to have fun, the groups downing their drinks in bars. Forget about words — sentences are spiderwebs of hope. Just look at how their lips move, how they wave their hands when they think no one is looking, the dampness of their eyes, the slow blinking: you’ll see greedy women and diminished men. It doesn’t matter if they’re in pairs, alone, reconciled, living with children who flow onward like tributaries until they spill into the river of a brand-new couple. Add clear and smooth skies so the picture doesn’t look so sinister, you still get the same exhaustion. They enter our manly young bodies and drain us of enthusiasm, energy, innocence, vigor. They rot our pulp, millions of healthy men reduced to slices of dried-out fruit. Haven’t you ever wondered why they live longer than us? When are we going to start really demanding our rights! Will no one come and rescue Western man?”

Carlos stopped the taxi at my door on Rocafort and vanished up the street without answering my questions. I hunted for my keys among the crumbs that had colonized my coat pockets. I climbed the stairs with my heart pounding, but I managed to get the door open. I poured a glass of rotgut, straight. I opened the window, and on the opposite pavement the abiding, luminous sparkle of the Adam nightclub was waiting. The night’s event was called an “On Fire” party, as if the rest of the week they just said their prayers. Those people really have a competitive spirit; maybe the thing involved sticking lightbulbs up their asses in tag teams. I raised my glass in a toast to the soda fountains where the poppers flowed freely: happy are the queers, for they shall inherit a nervous system free of feminine temptation. And like the aromatic vapor rising from a stew, the shouts of my new neighbor talking on the phone reached my ear; it sounded like she was hysterical and begging for help. Mother of two with the third on the way (what an idiotic expression, as if the fetus were traveling), chatting with a girlfriend about some guy with the proverbial blue eyes that drive you women crazy with the desire to swim in them. And according to this woman he had looked at her, which isn’t surprising if you consider the size of the eight-month-old ball growing between her hips. Scheming, fantasizing, implicating, and she only hung up because she thought the oven timer (she was making popcorn and it burned) was her husband coming home.

That was my welcome on completing the climb to the apartment, so I’m not troubled by what you wrote back when Doctor Bicente sent you a detailed report on his conversation with the good Carlos. This time you can’t deny that you replied, that you were thinking of me when you did it:

You’re a lost cause, Joan-Marc, and you’ve lost your mind. I won’t even bother reminding you that there are over 3.5 billion women in the world, because you are like a goat, and when it comes to goats (ask any vet), you just can’t reason with them.

I could answer you. Do you think I couldn’t? But I’d rather use the hints of personal investment I can make out in your short message (I’m sure you remember when you never sat down at the keyboard to type anything less than two full pages in Word, those furious letters that swept along all kinds of emotional debris, and I warn you that if you ever publish them, people will say that no one writes such long e-mails) to shine a little light on the bony structure I keep hidden under the flesh and blood of my tale of woe with Helen: I got to marry you, but I haven’t managed to keep you.

What kind of husband am I, if I didn’t even realize when I went to bed that it was the night you were going to leave me? I believe I took off my socks thinking it would have been a good night for you to be traveling — I could have continued my game of Age or stayed up late drinking. Instead, I deferentially fulfilled my tender obligation to lie down beside you, because you were supposedly no longer able to get to sleep without that contact.

I was rather annoyed when I turned on the light and found you gone. I felt like taking a lazy turn around your body, with one foot still in the world we build (and let crumble) while we sleep. I would have watched how your lips move, noticed the fine creases left by the pillowcase seams in the skin of your cheeks. I would have waited patiently for your eyes to open and reassume their natural fullness, return you to the quotidian abundance, the spectacle of the everyday.

I’m not fooling myself, I know that day wouldn’t have been that special. I would have taken off my pajamas and showered in a hurry, I would have made you toast and warmed the coffee while the sounds of you washing reached me from the bathroom. I would listen to them with a sense of loss, of irrational sadness, because you were the one leaving the house to go to work, and I was the one who’d stay home. I would have dangled some scandalous sound bite in front of you, something about the advantage of using babies with serious brain injuries in medical experiments instead of adult pigs. But you would dominate the conversation: what others thought of you, what they thought of us, of me through you. I never told you that your thinking was too fast for such slow hands.

I would try to guess what sort of meeting you had by the clothes you chose, what kind of men and women you were going to meet with. You’d look a little funny in those high heels, those stockings, the boots; not that they looked bad on you, just that they didn’t suit the señorita who doesn’t wear makeup, who leaves the house with bare eyes, whose ear piercing — made with a needle when you were a little girl — is closing up. Were you dressing up for someone? I can’t believe you’d dress like that just because that Diego guy was in the same building, but who knows? Very intelligent women of your caliber are like aliens, trapped between your less gifted sisters and your male equivalents, who are so much stronger. It must be complicated to live like that. The relief I would feel at hearing the door close and being left alone wouldn’t have lasted long; I was ashamed to go out in public like the common unemployed to buy bread, take a walk, head for the plaza. It bothered me that you questioned (with your eyes, with your annoyance) how my situation was any different, when I’d never really worked in my life. Why was it so hard for you to understand that no one ever expected me to sit in front of a computer for hours? The plan was always for someone else to waste their time earning money for me.

I’d spend the middle of the morning however I could, and then I’d make something fast to eat: spinach wrapped in filo; scrambled eggs with tuna, onion, and lime. But I couldn’t summon you at noon even by cooking up your favorite dish. So I would have restarted my game on the computer; I would have watched an episode of one of the series you downloaded and that I watched out of order since we couldn’t find the time to watch them together. Around mid-afternoon I would start to miss you, and I’d imagine you on your way out of the museum, your little handbag under your arm and wearing flat-soled shoes (a day without meetings), in jeans and the baggy red sweater, a tall dark girl with a refined beauty that you made an effort to tone down, who liked to be embraced while she slept, who read with a discipline and tenacity that made use of props — highlighters, pens, and adhesive page markers I spent five years trying to put into some order — and whose kisses were rushed because there was almost always something tugging at her curiosity.

But you had fled, and what I actually did all day long was try to work out when you would return. Of course I’d read your note, but it was too literary, excessive even for you. So I sat down at the little kitchen table, projected my mind into the future, and started to explore how our pairing would end. Who would get ill and be the first to go, things like that, as if what we were going through weren’t already an ending.

I tried to keep my cool, though no one would believe it if they calculated the frequency of my e-mails (technology makes everything far too easy). I was guided by a principle of economy — what good would it do me to expend all that emotional energy? Who would want that now? You’ll meet someone, and it will be such a natural thing I won’t even be allowed to complain; then you’ll forget me. Of course, you won’t really forget me, that’s just a figure of speech, because if we were capable of truly forgetting someone, we would wipe clean our shared existence, leave and be ready to try again. What you will do with me is reduce me to a cuddly size, to something comic and insignificant. What you’ll leave imprinted on me will be like a watermark; I won’t be able to erase it.

But don’t think I spend all day licking the raw edges of my wounds. Though the streets are a bit faded as they stretch before me, it’ll be no time at all before they recover their old intensity. My health sometimes seems a mess, but don’t let my tendency to exaggerate confuse you — the old organ of optimism is still beating, oozing the stuff of enthusiasm. I’ll grant you that my fling with the young girl doesn’t lend itself to a sentimental journey, but you know how it works: you feel you’re lost, but life (for lack of a better word) always catches up with you. You get interested by something that creeps into view, and the next day, though you don’t know how you got there, the landscape has changed completely. You’re OK as long as you don’t stay still, and staying still is impossible; you always move at the speed of time, even if it’s toward a dismal experience.

The fact is, I’ve spent my time looking for Eloy. I was intrigued, and I couldn’t think of a more exotic sauce with which to season the present. Plus, I was enchanted by the suggestive powers of phonetics; I let the sharp edge of his alias roll around (Larumbe, Larumbe, Larumbe). What a wonderful world, where a man can be seduced by a combination of fricatives.

I was resolved, but he wasn’t easy to find. They’d taken down the page with his contact information, so I dialed the agency’s number. I don’t know what men say when they’re making that kind of transaction (I didn’t even understand the services offered on the page, it was like a weather report to me), so I practiced putting on a perverted voice that was male but with effeminate touches.

The pimp who answered informed me that Señorita Larumbe didn’t work for them anymore, nor could he help me find Eloise; she’d “settled down.” I pushed harder; he hung up on me.

I wasn’t expecting anything grand from my reunion with Eloy, but after that setback the thing felt personal. I looked in the Web cache, and hidden in the electronic trail I found Eloy’s rates (eight hundred euros for two hours) and mobile number. It turned out to still work.

“Yes?”

“Hi.”

“Yes?”

“I’m a voice from your past.”

“Rolando?”

Rolando? What were you thinking, parents, when you named us? I recognized Eloy’s soft timbre immediately, though his retreaded body produced a new, pretty voice now. I felt a playful spirit of camaraderie awaken in me.

“Chicle.”

“You don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve heard that. Now there are no more than ten people you could be.”

“Nine. Antolín went to live with the Uros on Lake Titicaca. He sleeps on an artificial island made of straw, sunbathes naked, eats dried fish, lives without a roof.”

“Shall we rule out the ones who didn’t have a sense of humor?”

“Caballero. Perales. Zurrias. That’ll leave you with an initial five.”

“You’re not Pedro, either. Did you know he got in touch with me recently, and that we’ve seen each other?”

“The past travels in twos. It’s like a pick and roll.”

“It’s not a coincidence? Does the voice from the past know anything about what I’m like now?”

“You look marvelous in the photos. I wouldn’t be surprised if it asks for your photographer’s number.”

“This was a risky joke, Joan-Marc.”

“I’m sure you recognized me from the start. Everyone does, don’t think you’re so smart. I’ve just got such a recognizable voice.”

“Pedro told me about you and the state of your arteries.”

“The dirty little rat. That’s a prank I played on him. I didn’t want to intimidate him with my good health. When can we get together?”

“Another one who wants to dig around in the past.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea, I detest all that nostalgic crap. I’m interested in the present you. You’ve got to admit, some people have a pretty impressive here and now.”

“Are you dying of curiosity? It’s terribly entertaining to hear your voice. I’ll call you.”

“No, absolutely not. It has to be this week. Then I’m going to Montana. Fuokville is the best-kept secret in the United States — we’re repopulating the migratory routes of vultures. They’re splendid animals, and I’ve been invited to a carrion fest.”

“Are you an ornithologist?”

“Cold. I still don’t have a label. I just write the checks. I had a lucky streak on the markets. Don’t tell Pedro, it’d break his heart, he thinks I’m practically broke. It’s good for him to feel superior, to pay for my food, my coffee. Charity is a good painkiller.”

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying, spirit of the past. Are you free on Wednesday?”

“You took the words right out of my mouth. What do you think about meeting in Bonanova? You won’t believe it, but the Madri is still open.”

“I live in Sants now.”

“OK, you can catch the 75. Not that I travel by bus much, but I have, well…I had, and hope to have again, a girlfriend with family around there.”

“I’d rather you came to my house. You’ll like it — it belongs very much to the present.”

I jotted it down, something like Violant d’Hongria. We agreed on a time, neither too late nor too early.

“A stupid question: What should I call you?”

“Me? Eloise. That’s my name, I don’t have any other.”

I went out wearing a gabardine raincoat and gloves because the sky was black. I reached his street under gathering lumps of tar, but no rain was falling. I was very aware during my last twelve, ten steps, that I could have turned around at any second, disappeared without explanation, but I rang the bell of a house sandwiched between two apartment blocks, and I waited.

“You can come on up, I’m on the second floor.”

I went directly into a foyer. The light that the clouds let through concealed as much as it showed, and I felt a pinch in my chest when I confused a strange object with Dad’s Australian clotheshorse. I made out a staircase at the back, and I started up while slowly peeling off my gloves, finger by finger. Through a window halfway up I saw it was finally beginning to rain, weakly.

I don’t remember the pleasantries we exchanged. Eloy received me in loose white pants that weren’t very tight on him, billowed out like a woman’s, and an open-necked blouse. I don’t think we ever shook hands; he darted smoothly behind me to help me with the raincoat.

On a clear day, that enormous living room must have been luminous; now, the recessed bulbs were turned up high. He sat down on a three-seater sofa and crossed his legs, directing me to a leather armchair; it was very fashionable, like the rest of the furniture (my eye is still just as sharp, perfectly suited to a different walk of life). Through an alcove I could see more stairs; three stories — upstairs must have been the bedroom or a studio.

He smiled at me as he pointed to the small table between our chairs: ham, spelt crackers, and a bottle of Evan Williams.

“Impressive place.”

“You like it? It still doesn’t feel like mine. The upstairs is a disaster and downstairs needs a more modern touch. It’s a modest neighborhood, but there are people who pay a fortune to live in a matchbox in the center of town.”

He’d straightened the hair that fell in abundant reddish locks. It wasn’t just the implants, his entire body seemed polished from the inside: cheekbones, lips, back, the tendons of his neck, everything molded in a feminine register. It’s true that what the rhinoplasty had left of his nose seemed a bit ridiculous, but Eloy — Eloise — compensated with an energy that hadn’t come across in the photographs. A splendid specimen of a fully developed woman, thought out to the very last detail.

“Do you live alone?”

“I have the place to myself. I don’t bring anyone here, either.”

And she said it flirtatiously while pouring the first glass, bourbon over crunchy ice with a slice of lime. Her eyes grew damp with the same hunger they’d shown when, as a teenager, Eloy had taken the Star Wars figures out of their box, a collection the rest of us could only dream of. They’d probably be worth a fortune now.

“I already heard you don’t work where you used to work, doing that.”

“Did Pedro tell you?”

“I did my own research. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Secrets between boys? I like it. What would become of our social lives if we didn’t monitor what we say, and to whom? People are such schemers.”

“More like comedians. I’ve been thinking for a while that people are only worth what their secrets are. Show me your secrets and I can measure your quality. Of course, no one ever listens to what I say.”

“Do you like the drink?”

“It’s a luxury I shouldn’t allow myself anymore.”

“Aren’t carrion fests lucrative these days?”

“Touché? I’m sure you’re up to date on my separation, and my temporary ruin. I’m the favorite subject of my ‘best’ friend’s digital avatar, I lead a parallel life on his Facebook wall. But look at this place, the furniture, it’s not cheap. Did you win the lottery? Inherit a fortune?”

“Let’s say I did. It was a gift from a man I spent years with.”

“Will you introduce me? You never know.”

“He died.”

“Damn, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too. This is too dry for me, I’m going to get the wine.”

She got up slowly, emphasizing a very human bounce. I averted my eyes: an ashtray, a Nelson chair, and a Barceló worth much more than my little Miró, Dad, much more. And when she came back I wouldn’t know what on earth to say to her, not even with the bourbon giving me courage. Why should the life of Eloy-with-tits matter to me? If she started flirting with me, would I dare jump out the window? The rubble of ice in my glass reflected the lines of my snout: a man growing old in a happy world, a disastrous man with disastrous plans.

“What do you think about when you look at me?”

“Sorry?”

“It’s not easy for anyone. There are some things you just take for granted, things that won’t be problematic. You know, like the oak is a tree, the rose is a flower, the deer an animal, Catalonia our nation, and death inevitable. Boys are boys and girls are girls. Some boys like each other and that’s already an issue for some people, but they don’t stop being men because of it. Most of you are petrified, blinded by your morals: a gender should be fixed, a reliable border. I’ve found the best way to get past that is to ask you guys what you think when you see me.”

“What did Pedro think?”

“He tried to kiss me.”

“That lizard.”

“Are you avoiding my question?”

“I’m stubborn, you should know that, we’ve played together a thousand times. On the court. Under those lights. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Do you ever think about that? Don’t look at me that way. On the IPSI court, their homecoming, the gym was packed and cold enough to flay your knees. 79–78. Their defense was like a steel trap. I missed the shot because someone pushed me, and you came out of nowhere to grab the rebound and sink them with a slam dunk.”

“No old war stories. I’m begging you.”

“I’m going somewhere with this and you know it. We carried the game. The best was in the semifinals, ten points down, only five miserable minutes left. Antolín had fouled out and those smart-asses from Joventud were strutting around the court with the ACB logo. You and me on the bench, who knows why, but we couldn’t give up, it was our home court and we were wearing the La Salle jersey.”

“Descarrega and Miró in the game.”

“A blizzard of three-pointers, a regular bombardment, Little Boy and Fat Man, Napalm. The three classes in our year cheering, the ref ignoring Jacobo’s last foul to let the clock run down. A big win for our team and a kick in the ass for Penya, and that bunch of lanky chickens went back to the suburbs with their tails between their legs. Ha! The warm-ups, the tension in the eyes, everything floating on surges of adrenaline. With those tits you’d be hard pressed to run the counterattack over the center line, but you could probably still catch a rebound for the first time in your sorry career. Don’t you miss it?”

“Sometimes. It was one of the good things. That day my dad almost knocked yours over when he jumped up to cheer.”

“And your parents? What do they see when they look at you?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They’re trapped in the past, with Eloy. What about your father? Mr. Miró-Puig, I can just picture him, here in my living room, always so thin and well turned out. Think he was batting for the other team?”

“If you stood over him he looked like a little bird. Remember?”

“Better than you know. I remember all of you.”

“He died. I cremated him. It was sudden and I had to take charge. So he’s also there, trapped in the past, for more than fifteen years now.”

“You can’t imagine how sorry I am.”

“The crematorium was at the end of a narrow white dirt road. It was all very well organized. They stuck the box, American pine, into an oven that in a few minutes can reach eight hundred degrees, it runs on diesel. They let me watch through the peephole. Glowing streaks started to open in the wood, which cracked before the thing turned red hot, until finally there was only black smoke billowing around cooling ashes.”

“How long did it take?”

“I don’t know why I always assumed it would be quick. My dad was thin, so he took under two hours to burn, but the attendant told me that to get rid of a fat man completely it can take up to three hours. Once, they had a guy who didn’t fit in any box, so they stuck him in as he was and in less than half an hour there was so much melted fat under the singed and crunchy skin they were worried about the oven.”

“What did your dad die of?”

“The guy handed me the urn with an expression that said ‘this is all we are’—but that’s a lie. Bullshit, I hate that idea. Those cold ashes are everything we are not. He also told me to pray for my father, which seemed like good advice. It doesn’t matter how he died, it’s not important.”

“Don’t think you’re getting out of it. You owe me an answer. What do you see when you look at me?”

“You asked what I think about when I look at you. That’s totally different, completely unrelated, because what I see is good, so congratulations. On the other hand, what I think isn’t so nice. I wonder whether it scares you to consider what will happen when these looks of yours get old. The old transvestites I’ve come across aren’t exactly attractive.”

“That’s because you’re looking at me sexually. How many sixty- or seventy-year-old women do you know who aren’t sorry specimens in terms of attractiveness? Getting old is getting old.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Why did you come here? Why did you look for me? What are you doing?”

“Fair question, Eloise. It’s because of what we’re talking about: I came because I’m getting old. Aging isn’t like a diseased molar you can just yank out of the gum, it’s something that happens to the whole organism, the only one I have. Also because I’m alone, because my life is absurd and my problems can’t be solved like before, by running, or with my hands.”

“Another drink? I haven’t thought about that much. I’ve been busy with other things.”

“They say that life starts to move faster, that everything goes by at top speed during your forties, while you’re turning soft and gray-haired. Further on it slows down again, supposedly. I’ve heard that later, your memory opens up in all its splendor, and you can explore it top to bottom. Sounds nice, but the guys who talk like that don’t have to live in my head, I don’t want to live among the husks of days gone by. How long will I have left once I reach that serenity? There comes a time when the prostate can swell up and burst at any moment.”

“Do you have trouble sleeping?”

“I sleep like a baby — until I wake up at three or four. My biological alarm clock alerts me to the time for thinking about death, and my pores start gushing a cold liquid that can’t be only sweat. You know what I’m talking about, it must happen to everyone.”

“It never happens to me.”

“I’ve studied it. I think within twenty years they’ll be able to transplant a mature brain into a younger body, cultivated expressly in a nursery courtesy of your DNA. There’ll be all kinds of protests, but if you have money no one can stop you. We’ll move beyond the ultimate limitation, people will be born who will never know the final experience.”

“But if the brain gets sick, it will be horrible.”

“That’s almost solved, too. The streets are full of people walking around with pig ventricles and aortas stapled to them. They’ll do the same kind of thing with the brain, until they learn to grow brain cells resistant to aging.”

“And does it have to be from a pig?”

“Don’t panic. That’s just prejudice talking, and you should be familiar with that. Look at you. Thousands of people see a walking transgression where there’s only a pretty girl living her life.”

“Thank you, Joan-Marc. But this is all good news, right? With your pig-human brain transplanted onto a freshly hatched body, there’s no more aging, and—”

“Did you just use my name? No one does that.”

“I don’t like abbreviations or nicknames. Things are confused enough already.”

“I’m afraid of the operating room. The gowns, the lights, the anesthesia sucking out your conscience. The body laid open, defenseless, a fleshy wound. And even if everything goes well, you’ll still be left with flashes of memories from the pigsty floating around in there. Can I ask you a question?”

“Go right ahead.”

“How could you stand it? Everything you did to yourself?”

“You think I’ve transformed myself, but from my point of view this is my true body, and it’s made its way out through the ridiculous and masculine and hairily filthy false skin I used to wear that fucked my life up. Don’t you think I’m better now?”

“Much better. That scalpel was your fairy godmother.”

“It was a long process. Do you feel dizzy, too? Don’t give me any more booze.”

“Have you ever told anyone about it?”

“No. A finger, pour me one finger.”

“Tell me, if you want.”

“It’s a story with no beginning, or it began when I did, if you like. Since the very first sexual signs I’ve known they gave me a body with the wrong gender, that I was covered in the wrong skin. I denied it, I signed up for basketball, I tried to live like a gay boy. I dressed as a woman, in my mother’s clothes, or things I’d buy and then throw in the trash — all it did was make me feel like a creature whose ideas were grotesque once put into practice. I didn’t enjoy wearing dresses, or perfume, or imitating female gestures. I didn’t want to disguise myself as a girl, I was a girl, and I was disgusted with my body. Your brain transplant would have been a good solution for me.

“I didn’t start taking hormones until I was over twenty. I’d put in time researching what I could expect, and the messages were confusing. I started with a gentle hormone replacement therapy, I didn’t want to rush my body or wear it out. The theory is that they block the male hormones and substitute them with estrogen. In practice it makes your voice soften, you grow breasts like little cones. You might get a little whitish fluid leaking from the tips of your nipples, but it’s not milk, it’s a warning that some hormonal reading has skyrocketed. I felt dizzy, I stopped studying, I couldn’t stand the pressure of the questions or the sound of my own answers. I had to move. Even at the beginning the treatment is expensive, and then you go into a spiral: as the regimen demands more and more money to achieve your look, work possibilities diminish. I would have slit my wrists without the Internet, without the forums where girls talk about what they’ve gone through, what they’re waiting for. I don’t see any moral problem; I didn’t ask to be stuck in a man’s body. The Web put me in contact with girls from Madrid, from Valencia, but also from villages in León, bedroom communities. There was a Galician woman who got her skull split open with a stone — we’d been missing her for a week in the forums when we read about it in the papers. Luckily Barcelona is an open-minded city. You can laugh at that idea when you’re straight and you have kids and an apartment in the Quadrat d’Or and a well-paid job, but you don’t know how good it is here until you stumble and need some community support. Some of the girls made photo albums, recorded videos of the process. I promised myself I wouldn’t leave a trace, I’d put it all behind me as soon as I could.

“My face softened smoothly, the feminine features fitted together nicely as they settled in. It’s always a lottery — if you win it opens doors for you, both personally and work-wise. They weren’t pleasant people or jobs, but when you want something so expensive, something that puts such a strain on your life, you reduce your appetites, you learn to put the brakes on them. I came from a good family, from a school where they taught you how to land on your feet. I learned different skills in the bars, on the streets, at night, but the skill of interpreting people’s intentions when they approach you, of arranging your words to persuade or intimidate, that’s something you can’t improvise.

“I earned money to have laser depilation, and also had shaping done on my backside and on my thighs. When the testosterone falls, the fat layer changes and you get irregular blocks of cellulite. I welcomed that kind of complication. I discovered I could please a man looking like that. They were men who wouldn’t have gone out for a walk holding my hand, they wouldn’t have known how to reconcile me with the rest of their lives. But masculine sexuality doesn’t have to fit into a coherent whole, men will pay to have a passing desire catered to. I got lucky with the agency, and money is a magic potion. I found out I was good at it, I had a high libido: just brushing against their small desires, fleeting, avid, and brief, was enough to set me on fire.

“I reached a certain equilibrium, but it wasn’t enough, I was in limbo. Some nights I pulled out my hair, I called myself a coward, but now I’m proud I didn’t rush a single thing. I was patient, I researched every step of the way in the forums, I burned the midnight oil on open threads, I saved more money than I needed so I’d avoid any surprises. I barely let myself think about how while I was moving toward being a woman, my cells were using up the best years of their lives. I started with an Adam’s apple reduction — they didn’t even put me under. A fine incision along the crease in the skin of my neck was all they needed to file down the cartilage, but I had to pay for good hands. With a bad surgeon, you risk damaging the structure of the larynx, it can ruin your voice.

“I went to expensive specialists and didn’t let their first answer convince me. I demanded to know everything about the operation, how they were going to cut me and where. I demanded a detailed, day-by-day breakdown of the postoperative period, a list of possible outcomes. It seemed to me that the doctors looked down on patients who were in a hurry, who abdicated all responsibility — my attitude annoyed them at first, but they ended up respecting me. I was afraid they were hiding things so they could charge me for my rashness later in the operating room. They could always claim there’d been unforeseen complications, an accident, it would be so easy to disfigure me. I didn’t take all their advice, either. I knew it was a bit of a risk with the anesthetic, but I got through the fasts before operations by taking sips of J&B until the room started spinning. I was asleep, though, when they dissected the cartilage to reshape my nasal dome, and when I woke up slowly through the fog of leftover anesthesia, my nose was covered with a bandage and my nostrils blocked with gauze. On top of the discomfort and the problems eating, I had to give up smoking, because nicotine contracts your veins and stops scar tissue forming. I spent a feverish week oozing blood and saline. It was like incubating a live, half-formed animal in the middle of my face.

“I wanted to get there, but I never forgot the risk, I never stopped feeling that a cautionary hand was holding me back. Wasn’t that what our posh education was all about? I can’t hold it against them. Those priests knew what the world was like, they taught us how jagged it could be. Sometimes it seemed I was running on a track with hundreds of parallel lanes on either side of me. Others drew ahead, and then I’d overtake them while they were bewildered at finding themselves with noses that wouldn’t heal, or detached jaws, gangrene in their breasts, burst silicone. Others got exhausted, you’d find them lying in a squalid room. One girl went into her bedroom in the apartment she shared with three others, and flayed the skin from her face before sticking a pair of scissors in her neck, just because there was no way to correct the line of her jaw. Entire lives dedicated to extracting an imagined body from the real, and to have to die like that, without ever finding it.

“My only complications came in the minor operations. For my lips I tried injections of hyaluronic acid, but my body rejected it, and my face broke out in cysts. It was horrible, but didn’t last long. One of my girlfriends had a rash of yellow eczema on her arms that took two years to clear up. I found an expensive solution: liposuction. Instead of throwing away the fat, they injected it into my lips. The corners look pretty, it’ll last for years. I’m pleased; mouth operations can cause irreparable disasters. I’ve read how American actresses are pressured into things by their agents, and some spend decades drugged up so they don’t have to look at themselves in the mirror.

“I was really scared when they reconstructed my cheekbones. You might think it wasn’t a necessary surgery, but I’m sure you remember how my cheeks drooped, like a sad puppy’s. The technique is simple: they insert a tube into the cheekbone and inject fat cells that the face muscles assimilate as their own. When you’re ready, they make an incision in your palate and cut the bones with a saw. I know I’ve been like that, my head tied down and my face open and full of holes, while files break and polish my cheekbones, but I still can’t imagine what it’s like. When I woke up I couldn’t laugh, I’d lost my voice, I had an enormous wine-colored swelling. They had to admit me to the clinic, and I got very depressed. I was horrified by what I was doing to myself, what I was subjecting myself to. I’d gone almost a year without working. I wondered what you or Jacobo would think, whether you’d approve — how silly. The girls from the forum who lived in Barcelona responded to my calls for help and stopped by to cheer me up. Nice ones, shy ones, crazy, obscene ones, a complete spectrum of characters.

“One afternoon, I was alone with the girl who I got along with best: refined, pretty, from Molins de Rai, tormented by her size-ten feet. She was determined to have a sex change, only she was out of work and refused to be a prostitute. Her father was pressuring her to go to a psychiatrist to be ‘cured.’ She had chewed fingernails, skinned fingers.

“There was one of those talk shows on TV with a lot of shouting, and one of the shouters was a transsexual reveling in the role. ‘Disgusting,’ my friend said. But it didn’t seem to me like the tranny made her tribe look any more ridiculous than the heterosexual woman who assured the audience that her cunt tasted like a cunt, or the host who every half hour managed to dump a steaming bucket of shit over his head. Since I couldn’t talk I didn’t answer, and it took me a minute to understand that my friend from the forum wasn’t making any kind of moral judgment. She said: ‘All the money she earns, and she spends it putting on and taking off lips and chins, silicone inside and silicone outside. And she doesn’t realize that balloon of a forehead makes her look sub-normal. It kills her. With the money she spends fucking up her face, she could make four girls like me happy.’

“We shared the feeling of being intruders in our own bodies, but our characters were as different as any two people. I ended up changing my number, I left the forum. I’m very grateful to all of them.

“I didn’t have the nerve for breast implants until there was someone beside me to hold my hand. I chose the silicone gel and had them cut along the axillary dome. I wanted the implant between my pectoral muscle and ribs. For the first time, the money didn’t come from my bank account. I remember the lights in the corridor and an enormous wall clock that seemed to be waving good-bye as my consciousness dissolved into the sedatives. It turned out well, it all turned out well. I lost the feeling in my nipples for a week, and at first the breasts were too high and separated because my taut skin wasn’t used to carrying so much weight. The body reacts to implantation by wrapping the prosthesis with a fine covering. If the capsule of human tissue gets too hard, then complications begin, but everything turned out fine. I spent the post-op period listening to songs from the eighties, happy and buoyant music, lively, punky, wonderfully naive stuff. I held back from looking in the mirror until the implants had settled in, until the fat had absorbed the bruising and my back had gotten used to the new weight. They’d already cut into my face, neck, armpits, and inner thighs, but the breasts were something new, a revelation, as if a believer had grown angel’s wings. I lifted my shirt like a teenage girl wanting a photograph to document their roundness, and there they were, devoid of milk or mammary glands. I was so moved when I uncovered my new torso that I started laughing and crying at the same time. I wanted to call my boyfriend, but my voice wouldn’t come. Really, though, I’m glad I didn’t see him, it was a private moment.

“Embryos make such a huge effort to get into the light of day. Of course, they’re not conscious. It took me a bit longer than nine months to develop a new body, and I did it with my eyes open, I was watching the whole time while it grew.”

“Do you have orgasms like a chick?”

“They can’t transplant a cunt — that, they cannot do. They cut your penis and testicles, and they use that tissue plus skin from your thighs to make a neo-vagina. That’s what they call it, can you believe it? The nervous system is still a man’s, so no female orgasms, but if everything turns out well you stay sensitive. They keep the nerves of the glans and move them to the inside of the genital cavity. They’re longer than a woman’s, that’s why it works.”

“And are you going to operate down there?”

“I don’t dare. The stitches, the Betadine, absorbent sheets, drainage, destroying the bacteria in the colon with shots from a syringe, the dilations so the pelvic wound doesn’t close while the other scars heal, the probes. I can’t stand the idea. You can lose your libido, you can experience sudden, irrational nostalgia for the flap of skin you’ve spent years hating as if it were a tumor. The absence can be as sensitive as an amputated arm. I’m going to stay like this, I’ve had enough. I want the world to consider me a woman without going through another operation. And depending on how you look at it, the thing does function like a clitoris.”

Conversation is so mundane, full of words without any weight or intensity. So it’s really strange when it speeds toward intimate areas. I’m good at recognizing when words start to coil into blind curves, beyond which anything at all could be waiting.

“Can I touch?”

“Down there?”

“The breasts, I mean.”

“My breasts? Among people who’ve had the operation, mine are pretty ordinary. Don’t tell me you’ve never touched any?”

She ran her fingers through the mass of her hair and let it fall. You’d think she hadn’t learned the gesture by studying women, that it came naturally.

“Never fake ones. It’ll stay between friends. For old-time’s sake.”

I almost put on a glove (that was Dad’s ghost in me). I reached out my hand, then she pulled down the neckline of the blouse. The filling was less suggestive than the natural, sensual mass, but the skin was skin: soft, hot, with all its pores and sensitive circuitry. Her attitude helped, too: wanting to have them, to put them on. I didn’t prolong the contact.

“Thank you.”

“I can’t believe you’ve never touched one, Joan-Marc, but then you always were so naive. I can still see you jumping around on the court, that finer version of you. And it’s not that you’ve gotten fat, you’ve hardly put on weight at all. It’s just that no one told you the impression you gave: in class, on the playground, always so far beneath your potential. A wasted boy.”

I let him get away with all that sissy shit not because the shadow of touching him was still hanging over us, but because the overarching effect of the conversation, the alcohol, the enticing flirtation with the past, and the tug of camaraderie all came together, melting into an unconscious feeling of affectionate well-being: terrifyingly human sympathy. I didn’t want to leave. One more drink and I’d have asked her to dance.

“It’s late. We’d better stop.”

She didn’t say “get out,” she didn’t say “leave now.” She got up from the sofa, and the friendliness had vanished under the mask of cold serenity she’d perfected.

“You’re right. But let’s meet again, Eloise.”

She helped me on with the coat. She handed me my gloves.

“I can hear the effort every time you think ‘Eloy’ and end up saying ‘Eloise.’ I can’t stay in contact with you guys. You know, I never liked women as much as I do now that I’m like this. The metamorphosis demands a lot of discipline if you don’t want to break down halfway there. Descarrega is still alive within Larumbe, but I’m not going to let him come back, there’s no going back. This is my normal.”

“I understand.”

“No. You couldn’t understand. I appreciate you trying, though. I always thought you were a good person, after all. I’ll walk you out.”

We went down the stairs. From the ground-floor window the treetops reminded me again of an excited mammal. We must have an organ that still hasn’t been identified, because I sensed in the back of my neck that Eloise had stopped halfway down the stairs.

“Do you want to smoke? I like to smoke here, if you don’t mind, it relaxes me. I’ve thought of loads of things I’d still like to say to you, how silly. It’s like my mind speeds up when it’s time to say good-bye.”

“Give me one.”

“You talk, talk, and talk, only to find you haven’t even gotten started. You know, when I spent two weeks swollen up like I’d been run over by a truck, instead of dreaming of someone who would give me a hand, I thought about basketball. Once I could chew again, I went down to the port to eat rice with lobster and drink half a liter of house wine. Unfortunately it wasn’t such a nice day, but I still took a dip at five o’clock. The water was murky, full of algae and oil, and there were boys swimming, and there was the smell of grilled shrimp and mussels coming from the restaurants. The air gave me goose bumps, little bubbles of skin, and the sun ignited and extinguished scales of light on the sea, like that infinite surface was made up of a flickering swarm of blue butterflies. The idea disgusted me and I got out, water sliding down my new body, every drop hardening the sand it fell on. The boys were sunbathing, playing football, laughing out loud. I would have liked to introduce myself to any one of them — they all eat and sleep and go to work — have him show up all nervous at six to pick me up, and walk around like two friends until it got dark.”

“I get the idea.”

“You’d have to see it inside me, now that would be something. But you know, it doesn’t matter how many times they cut you, what they add to you, what they take out, your thoughts are still hidden in the brain, inside the skull, behind the frontal bone. A triple protection.”

“It’s not such a bad thing. Thoughts don’t tend to be all that pleasant.”

“In isolation they’re unrepresentative and unfair, sure. But I like to think that if we were to spread them out at the end of a life, and someone were to take the trouble to read them sympathetically, the result would be reassuring. Phobias, aggression…everything more manageable when you place it within a larger whole.”

I smiled at her. That was my only reply, all I was capable of. I’ve realized that I only know how to talk when I’m on the attack, going full speed, and as soon as my pulse calms I go blank. Eloise waited a second longer, leaning against the wall; it must have weighed her down to walk around with all that on her chest. For a while Helen had to sleep in a kind of harness, and even you had back pain sometimes.

“I envy the trees. They really know how to grow upward, and they have that system of aging and expanding that moves the earlier filth away from the core. With us it’s different, of course — you know, abandoned years, ones that no longer fit. But even if you let them rot they don’t go away, you’ll always run into people who remember them.”

She crushed her cigarette gently against the wall. I hadn’t even lit mine, and I put it in my pocket as a kind of souvenir. She tossed me the keys to the front door. We’d passed the ball thousands of times in practice, and I caught them in the air. It was a simple deadbolt lock. Behind the curtain of rain, the massed buildings trembled softly.

“Can I ask one final question?”

“I’m not saying a word about my prostate, Joan-Marc.”

“I assumed the anatomy class was over. It’s about Star Wars. Do you still have any of those figures?”

“Figures?”

“Boba Fett, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, C-3PO. You had hundreds. In a box shaped like the Millennium Falcon. I was so jealous.”

“You were jealous of me? Joan-Marc Miró-Puig was jealous, and of me — now that’s funny. No. None. I don’t even remember where they went, I’m sorry.”

We kissed each other on the cheek. Her perfume covered any hint of masculine aroma, and it was no more repugnant than any other thing you all spray on yourselves, reminiscent of burned wood, with the trace of cinnamon I grew up associating with Dad. My raincoat was getting soaked. I tried to open the umbrella and I felt her fingernails on my hand. A wall of water blurred the other side of the street.

“Just stop it with all that age shit; you’re very young.”

She let go of me slowly, and I followed the street until it opened onto Carretera de Sants, its shopwindows projecting shining brushstrokes over the pavement. Even though you grew up here, I’ve never understood this neighborhood, nor do I understand these good kids who whizz around the streets on their mopeds carrying lunch boxes full of crumbs, their backs weighed down with work and the temptation and the fear of never leaving these streets behind. Nor do I understand all these shoes, toys, hardware shops, shirts, keys, notebooks, and bars where they serve pork shoulder and rice and sandwiches, with all their heaters and air conditioners, the smell of fried food and chemical lemon air freshener. I understand the dog dragging himself along like a drenched mop, and I understand the SEAT and Renault cars that steam impatiently at the traffic lights. But don’t ask me to understand those thin girls who stand on tiptoe to kiss their boyfriends while their mobiles ring in their knockoff handbags; blue screens, sport socks. I was getting hungry, but I didn’t want to get on a bus. The foot traffic urged me to get walking, and I sped my steps toward Plaça de Sants and its trees. There were so many things I didn’t understand as a boy, and I still don’t understand them. My eye has grown wider but it hasn’t learned to let in more light. If you take away the civil demands on me, I’d be the same child, fascinated with the world, learning the names of hundreds of colored, creaking objects around him. Matter strikes me as a good thing and cities are impressive and how can I say a bitter word about the worst moments as long as I get to stick around here?

An innocent, yes, a dreamer. What else are all these pigeons trying to tell me, swooping over the plaza’s pitiful sand with their racket of beating wings? The dark crowds moving like a finger into the mouth of the metro didn’t help me think, either. I moved away from the plaza, crossed a little island with two peeling benches, skirted a pile of shit — trampled and split like a ripe fruit — and passed a phone booth that looked like a monument to an obsolete technology. I entertained myself comparing the prices of eyeglasses, looking at orthopedic shoes, pricey high heels, sports gear, wooden chairs, cheese sandwiches, and in the window of a bakery I recognized the same Swiss roll with thick cream they used to buy for Pedro and me when we finished practice.

And I may be innocent, but I’m not such an idiot that I didn’t notice what was cooking between Eloy and Dad. Another Australian clotheshorse? The sudden interest in his cremation? The giggling? The smell of cinnamon? Was it you, Eloy, who sought Pedro out so he could tell you the end of the story, your story with my father? Did you buy her that house, Dad? Did she blackmail you? Did she hang you herself? That would be one explanation, and a good one at that, for your calluses. I’d only have to force the chronology a little. OK, he was a woman now, but he’d played basketball, and you were always a weakling, Dad, a wimp. I was tempted to retrace my steps and interrogate Eloy, but if he had been important to you, how would we make up in the Great Beyond if I overdid things now?

Why couldn’t you have been like other men and insist ad nauseum that we all go out to eat together: me, my sister, and your new girlfriend, to play at getting along as a new family? Why couldn’t she have been one of those affectionate, common girls who think their situation isn’t respectable unless they can knead their hands into the dough of your past? I can’t speak for my sister (OK, I’m convinced she would have managed to be fantastically rude), but I assure you, Dad (how I miss your voice, Dad), that I would have done my best to skirt around our sentimental mess; I, for one, would have lived up to my reputation: generous, friendly, loyal. A real champ, in the broadest sense of the word. I know loads of jokes for situations like that, I’ve built up a lot of experience with separations. I’m good at it, I know how to break the ice, I’d manage to make everyone feel comfortable. Let’s speak honestly, Dad: Why the secrecy? Was there still a thread of love that tied you to me and to Mother? Did it hurt? You know what I think? That you used us to hurt her. Pleurisy, diabetes, clogged arteries, hypertrophy of the prostate, omnivorous cancers, renal deficiency…long before one of those things does us in, our ridiculous private lives will. Sometimes I have the feeling that no matter what I do, life is impossible. That’s the only lesson to learn, the only one we don’t want to learn.

I spent what was left of the afternoon taking bites of that log of cream wrapped in fragrant crepe dough, sitting at a table designed for pygmies. When the clouds in the sky parted, there was no longer any light, the pedestrians were moving in a mauve shadow, in their imitation leather jackets, Caramelo coats, and those impossible bomber jackets; many greeted each other as they passed, they looked like they were about to break into song. Pedro would have liked to know that they still made our pastry, but I’ve been avoiding him since the night we went to Sónar; I made the decision while I was fixing him a stomach-settling herbal tea, although ultimately I went instead with some fist-like buds that unfolded into surprisingly colorful petals on contact with the boiling water. I figured they’d do something good for him. I also made two pieces of toast for myself. I put it all on a tray and headed into the living room.

Pedro was still sleep against the sofa’s armrest, with his knees folded up and his mouth open, his nose whistling like a teapot. When his mother gave him that name I don’t think she thought he’d turn out so big, such an impotent mammal. He’d fallen asleep with the windows closed, and the whole room smelled of him.

I opened the curtains and raised the blinds. The room was soaked in light. I picked up the coats, straightened the chairs, emptied the glasses, and put away the bottles. Citizens flowed through the street (open kiosks, two bicycles, flowerpots tied down on the terraces): the dense mental foliage of regret, expectation, courage, and timidity writhing around in thousands of heads — what fabulous instruments. I ate a piece of toast. I got out a couple of cloths and dusted the furniture; what would my sister say? I felt the pleasant separation of the folds of my spirit; I made sure the murderous boxes were still in place and I sat down in the armchair to entertain myself with Pedro’s records. I guess I was waiting for him to wake up and restart the conversation, but he went on making faces and emitting noises. I looked for his wallet and took out forty euros, and I covered him with a blanket. I checked the taps and the gas and went around turning out the lights of the museum-house, but since I didn’t want Saw to wake up and think his eyes had been torn out (not everyone knows that blindness is thick and white), I turned on the lamp and left it glowing greenly.

What advice could I give that poor idiot? I don’t know any painkillers that work against the passing of the years or the many beautiful things that have died, swept away by the current of everyday life: hours and hours of indescribable vulgarity. Nor could I convince him that in general terms, this delicate business of living was going to get any better: age arranges things so the outlook only gets worse and worse. In terms of women…well, there were my marriages and a dozen girlfriends, falling one after another, asphyxiating the beacon of sex. What disaster can compare to the separation of a human couple: wrenching out living nerves implanted in your very heart? Haven’t we had enough? Isn’t this a good moment to turn out the light and say: “OK, that was good, it’s over, this is it, good-bye, good-bye?” I’m just saying that it’s fairly difficult to access sex; it should be simpler to free oneself of desire. Ever since I’ve had rational thought I’ve liked girls, ladies, women — their various incarnations for my changing biological phases. I appreciate their gorgeous design, the way they measure and evaluate each other, that heron-like way their eyes dilate when they see something shiny, what they can provoke in me using only their hair. I came to think: poor me, poor us, the ones who knew how to treat them. I told myself that I know when to remind them how pretty they are, how to act when they have those crises of confidence so deeply rooted in their hormones. I’ve always found myself willing to shelter them in my arms, to place the powers of my masculinity at their disposal. If it didn’t work out, it’s partly because the ones I found myself with weren’t what I’d been told to expect: no smiling creatures — serene, complicit, silent, and celestial — no humming or baking pies. The women who came and collided with my oh-so-sensitive present have all been complicated and ambitious, subject to shifting moods. If we’ve already played our cards, why don’t we fall into that armchair like lay monks, among crumpled socks and almost clean utensils, in the proud neglect of shared bachelorhood? Was that what Pedro was asking me from the sofa, rolled up like a question mark?

I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what the secret is. It seems like a choice but we are gripped by tenderness just as we are by the fingers of excitement that testosterone sends forth from the gonads. If Saw was thinking about retiring it was for reasons of comfort, not out of weakness. It wasn’t because any flame had gone out in him, what rubbish that is. If there’s anything that doesn’t degenerate in this ruin of flesh, it’s the old mass of muscles stuck in the middle of the body. We can go gray, we can get tired, the walls of our lungs can dry out, our retinas can separate and our veins clog up, and there’s no way to keep the joints from hardening; cancerous blooms can flower, and maybe they slice out your prostate and anal tissues and reduce your manhood to the dimensions of early infancy; they can cut open your skin, flesh, and fat, make their way through the sternum with a surgical saw among clouds of bony dust to patch, numb, or restart the heart with electrical stimuli; as long as the thing goes on beating, you’re not going to stop it. That stubborn and muddled organ will go on pumping oxygenated blood until the day it dries out, shiny with symbolic functions, lighting cerebral pathways with the electricity of infatuation. The flesh rusts and wears out, but love is part of consciousness, it’s our species’ vocation, it’s going to shake us till the end.

Oh, will it ever shake us.

It had been almost three months since I’d exchanged a word with my mother. I magically associated her sporadic improvement with your eruption in my life, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her you’d run off. Back in May I’d dodged a barrage of phone calls, and then I forgot her until last Thursday, when I was watching something harmless and ridiculous on TV — it’s like taking a hot bath; I could feel the self-pity oozing from my pores. They were showing a documentary about old people who waste away in their bedrooms, alone and bewildered, abandoned by children who no longer believe in rewards in the afterlife and have their hands full keeping themselves on their feet in this vicious life. The program was interrupted and the darkened screen reflected my image back to me, wearing little Magnum-style shorts, an old T-shirt (Batman), all five depraved fingers delving into the bag of cashews for another dose of cholesterol. My excuse was that African gusts of heat had invaded Barcelona (a wind that burned when it touched your skin), and I was in no shape to invest in an air conditioner. I felt prematurely orphaned, I jumped up, tense with genuine concern. I called my mother, twice; she didn’t answer, but since it was two in the morning I wasn’t all that worried; she must have been asleep. I felt better imagining how at breakfast she would have the pleasure of seeing my number recorded in the memory of her mobile, and I fell asleep.

Three days (and some fifty calls) later, I started getting really nervous, imagining her corpse sitting there in the living room rocking chair. I decided to go see her. I would have gone sooner, but the last time I’d visited I found her so improved I thought she must be breathing her last. I’d deliberately left my set of keys at the apartment so she couldn’t call on me in an emergency. I put on a linen jacket and went from Rocafort to Via Augusta by bus, up the shady side of Muntaner on foot, but I still couldn’t avoid the sweat starting to prickle. I almost collapsed at Pàdua, and I asked a taxi driver to take me up the steep narrows of Balmes. I was still moved by how the street opened into wider lanes before circling the rotunda to face Passeig de la Bonanova, which greeted me with a light that looked like gold dust. I had the taxi stop two doors before the Miró-Puig building, not out of nostalgia, but because I wanted to keep more of the last twenty-euro note I had to spend this month. It was disheartening, in order to pay the rent, to have to resort again to the waning mass that out of habit and convenience I continue to call my “savings.” And if Mother really was dead it still wouldn’t salvage my situation — my sister would refuse to sell the apartment. She wouldn’t even look for an elaborate excuse, she’d have enough just by smearing a few sentimental arguments on top of some other shit: prices were going down, the market was weak, she wasn’t willing to give up the family’s property just because of my lack of planning. Before I see any of that money, I’ll have to wait until the gonorrhea that stopped her giving birth spreads and cleans her out entirely, and she’s corroded down to her bones.

Four years earlier I would have been able to turn to one of the neighbors, but the area had been filled with German and Japanese executives and I didn’t know anyone. I saw myself reflected in the glass door, the same shank of hair as when I’d stood a few feet lower. It’s a characteristic of our class that we remain loyal to the same parting of our hair as we grow old; really, they should subsidize me as an endangered species. Since I left home, they’d redone the hallway half a dozen times: parquet, stucco, plastic plants.

I cupped my hands and saw the doorman’s empty booth, a Barcelona curiosity you can still see in the streets that radiate from Diagonal’s elegance. But no one had taken the trouble to plant a new Señor Man in the vacant space — that little guy who’d known how to change a flat tire on a bicycle, keep track of visitors, deliver the mail, scare my sister without moving a muscle, and dictate complicated orders over the phone. Crammed like a fake Chinaman with a woman and two strange children into a cramped dwelling; my mother must be the only one in the whole building who remembers his cold, subservient manner, his subaltern tone that suited the tiny furniture they lived among. You can’t blame the world for taking down a womanizer like my father, but that it would take the trouble to expel Man de Togo, the sort who watches the world from such a low vantage point he can scarcely glimpse reality…now that just seems like abuse. People like him should get to live for two hundred years as compensation. I buzzed the intercom, but my mother’s corpse didn’t answer. I looked closely at the grooves of the speaker; the African wind carried dry leaves, and I tried to interpret the message they held for me. It’s odd how the brain gets superstitious as soon as it feels impotent. I was already searching for Muñoz the locksmith in my mobile’s contacts list when I heard the creak of the buzzer.

My legs were trembling and I felt a coil of heat winding up my forearm, but I couldn’t allow myself a heart attack. However many nuts I may have swallowed that week, they had to bear with me for a couple more hours. I rested with my hands on my knees, my eyes fixed on the mailboxes; I couldn’t remember when my mother had removed Dad’s name. When I felt better I was overcome by a softer, nuanced version of the same nervousness I’d had back when his home was my home and there was always news to share, when I was a boy edging into life and the world extended only as far as my parents could see. Señor Man’s old booth was where the new tenants stored their folding bicycles, but the renovations and departures and new residents had not dissipated the familiar odor those walls gave off.

I didn’t dare take the elevator up. The door had to be opened from inside, and Mother might be moribund beside the sofa — it seems incredible, but those things happen to old people all the time. I opted for the stairs, six floors, and I heard how my organs churned inside me. When I reached the top it took me five minutes to catch my breath. I knocked on the door, then rang the bell: short rings, long ones, intermittent, continuous; I leaned on it to call forth an unbroken clamor. Nothing worked. I ruled out Muñoz, I wasn’t going to profane my parents’ home. Then my sister wouldn’t answer her phone — for all I knew she was in cahoots with social services to leave all the horror to me. When we were little and took the bus together, we’d play a game where we worked out what age I’d be when she turned ten, fifteen, the improbable eighteen: the same span moving along a changing series of numbers. But I’d been frightened at the thought of Mother passing forty, or of her seeing me at that age. Our relationship was based on a certain freshness, and whatever went on between an old lady and a mature man was sure to be polluted. I threw myself to the floor, as if a note might be waiting for me in the space under the door, or as if my fingers could slide underneath like flexible tentacles and reach up to the lock.

I heard a door open on the landing a floor below. My jacket was ruined.

“Your mother is in Berlin.”

I peered over the stairs. What was my mother’s corpse doing in Berlin? I gave the usual excuses to refuse the neighbor’s invitation to come in — I found the voice that came from her corroded vocal cords unpleasant — so she shouted my mother’s plan from the landing, and the story seemed to check out: she’d left the address of a small hotel, and my set of keys. She’d left her mobile at home, by accident.

“Some crackpot has been calling her nonstop. But if you want to talk to her I can give you numbers for Lucas and Bruno, her travel companions. It’s lucky she has them, they take her mind off things. No one ever comes to see her, I suppose you don’t have the time.”

A week later I went back to Bonanova, lured by my mother’s promise to cook my favorite dish. When she opened the door I was met by the smell of apricots. The walls were painted salmon, there was a new rocking chair, new cushions, and an air conditioner: she had invested in comfort. She greeted me in a robe that looked like an updated version of the uniform she wore when you first met her, after she unexpectedly emerged from the fog of pills. Instead of the stupendous rabbit paella glittering with saffron, she put a plate of sweet pork knuckle in front of me (Dad’s favorite). But even then I failed to realize she’d summoned me there to read me my death sentence.

“I’m thinking of selling the apartment to the bank. They’ll get the freehold, but they’ll give me a juicy payment every month until I die. How about that?”

Now I know that people keep fighting until the end, that they move around just to reassure themselves (and prove to others) they’re still active, but her newfound energy was an unexpected aggravation. I’d convinced myself that savings plans weren’t for me, because I was fairly confident that my share of the apartment would ensure me a peaceful old age.

“You two are grown up now, and I could really use the extra money.”

What for, Mother, if you’re just going to die? What kind of irresponsible parents fall into ruin and sell off the inheritance just to buy some lousy appliances?

“You don’t look happy with the idea, Juan. I don’t understand, you’re always griping about how I never get out.”

She told me that she’d been going dancing every other day with the Lucas & Bruno social club. I didn’t ask her where she went, I didn’t inquire about her circle of senile dancers — my imagination jumped to scenes of robberies, sprained ankles, kidnappings, verbal abuse. I focused on what time she came home, and it turned out she never went to bed after eleven. She added a childlike smile, and I had to admit she couldn’t even come up with the same grimace as before. My real mother (the Mother from the past) was more formal; that saucy pout was a recent acquisition.

“Plus, girls get in free.”

On the nights she stayed home (because of rheumatism, or a cataract that left her half blind, or some other ailment of seventy-year-olds), she organized dinners, and they listened to music on her iPod speaker — the last thing I expected to find in our apartment.

“Sometimes I sing, and I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Just a Barça game now and then — I love Ricard’s little laugh.”

She got up to clear the plates, and it was true, Mother had a pretty voice. The story was that Grandma hadn’t let her have lessons, because in her house it was considered a profession for hussies. Of course, that may have been a tale Mother told about a cousin or friend, another ten years and I might not be able to ask her anymore. There are stories that move across the earth over a given period, they’re like bonds that tie communities together. Then they come untied, they get lost, give way to another current of history, how strange. I never told you about that, and it would have been lost: I used to fall asleep listening to Castilian songs that both saddened me and made me feel safe. Though I knew the sound came from my mother and I could just reach out and touch her, it seemed like those melodies came from great, unfathomable depths.

“I don’t have time to make you any dessert because they’re coming to pick me up at six today. Do you want coffee? Aren’t you going to ask me about Berlin?”

She didn’t ask about my sister or about you or Dad (what can I say, I can’t help but think a man like him should go on sparking conversation). She hadn’t exactly turned her back on us (she’d invited me for dinner, and I was the one who hadn’t phoned her in six months), but her two flesh-and-blood children seemed like an islet of detached land moving away from her. It didn’t feel like she was making the slightest real effort to fit us into her agitated present. She had only one photograph of me on display: that hateful shot from the day I took my first communion, in a Lacoste shirt and with ruddy cheeks, back when I could trace a deep parting, like a living groove, in the mass of hair plastered down with gel. Back when I could disguise myself, when I’d belonged to her.

She walked toward me, moving inside her sexless apron; she’d done something new to her hair and it looked good on her. I suppose I always knew she was a tall mother, buxom, attractive in her own way but too demure to be noticed on the playground where we boys were entranced by the racy clothes on the newly divorced mothers. Did she ever dye her hair blonde? She looks the same in all my memories, smoking slowly, in profile, distracted. She was alive, I could ask her; she was alive, though in an altered form. But I was going to let it pass, it wasn’t a conversation we would have. None of those feverish boys could understand the allure of understatement, the value of women who keep their beauty for their husbands’ beds. Dad must have had a grand old time with such a statuesque woman — that kind has much more skin, and I think their bodies run hotter. Plus, Mother would blush at the drop of a hat; he must have eaten her up.

Dad was so serious (he called me into his office!) when he told me four years too late about the secrets of the intimate union between men and women, dispelling all hope that they’d managed to conceive me without all that genital jiggery-pokery. His demeanor also convinced me that there would be further, similar meetings, and new explanations: at fifteen, twenty, past thirty. But he never did meet with me again, he didn’t pass on the rules of the game. Nor did either of them sit me down to explain patiently what was expected of me: not in my first marriage, nor during the second; and what good would it do me now that those episodes are closed (because you’re not coming back)? How quickly the dream fades.

“How was Berlin, Mother?”

She sat down with a hand in her pocket and a nice smile that hinted at private thoughts. What next, a boyfriend? For the love of God, Mother, it was already hard enough to imagine that after giving birth to my sister your body was alive enough for the conjugal struggle. Of course, we discover startling things about people in their forties once we join their ranks, and I’ve heard of eighty-somethings who get married in the old folks’ home and go off on cruises to Mallorca, though I’d feel more comfortable assuming they spend their nights counting stars. My mother’s insides now couldn’t be up for much; the fallopian tubes, the placenta, everything gets wrinkled like the skin on the face, but maybe the vagina was still in good shape, maybe rejoining the fray is just a question of what gets you going. They say that mothers can interpret the waves given off by their children’s thoughts, and maybe you think that’s absurd, but when I looked up, Mother was so red I had to avert my eyes and look out at some branches, long like feather-covered wings.

“See for yourself.”

And she tossed one of those touchscreen phones onto the table. She did it like someone laying down a hand of aces, so we probably were indeed playing at something with winners and losers. I had to concentrate because the icons on those crappy things are too small for my fingertips, but before I saw anything she whipped it out of my hands, a slightly unhinged tone to her laughter.

“How silly. I made a mistake. They’re on this one, Juan.”

She handed me a simpler mobile, but I waited for her to come back with the coffeepot before looking at the photos. The brew was very strong, and some of the grounds had come through the filter. She recited the names of all the monuments. Most of the images were blurry on the little screen, covered in a fuzz of snow, as if when we’re pushing seventy we no longer have a margin to go on pretending that we’re recording and saving ourselves for later: at that point we’re not seeking to recapture the past or disguise the onset of age, those images won’t protect us, we’re only looking for a bit of company before being left alone with the end of time.

I poured another glass of sherry.

“Take your time, finish the bottle if you want. I’m going to lie down. As I said, they’re coming at six to pick me up.”

I left the coffee and finished the sherry. Mother had forgotten the smartphone on the chair, and I swear I only picked it up to practice with those little icons. The photo folder was empty; she used it to record videos. I skipped over “Berlin” and “Berlin1” and “Berlin2” and “Berlin3,” and among the three files of “Party” I chose “Party2.” The background noise was a bombardment of shouts and sounds that gave me the physical sensation of arriving at a party where everyone else has been drinking for hours. The table was the same one where the “coffee” was now growing cold, and the sofa the same one that, twenty-five years earlier, I’d flopped onto after practice to rest. I didn’t know the woman who was dancing, writhing in catlike contortions, or the pot-bellied man. They were lost in that no-man’s-land between fifty-five and seventy-five. The video was recent — there was the air conditioner. The man pushed his belly forward and the woman started to bend her knees and lower her shapeless behind until her eyes were at the height of his crotch. The background noise got louder, approaching pandemonium, and in the living room of our home she unbuckled his belt, freeing a mass of fat and flesh, and stuck her fingers into his underwear. I didn’t want to see any more. I dropped the phone and let the video finish with my eyes fixed on the greenish-yellow foliage of the banana trees. The sound went on for a good ten minutes.

What I did next was leave the glasses in the kitchen, wash my hands, and make sure the gas rings were turned off. I went down the hallway and into the bedroom to say good-bye. She’d fallen asleep with the TV on, something about a talk show host whom they suspected was an extraterrestrial, a subject I certainly want to look into further. In her apron-robe uniform, the sleepy expression on her face had relaxed her features and she was showing her vulnerable age again. The tiny lines that started at her upper lip were there, lines that were also beginning to show on my sister’s face: twenty thousand genes unleashing packets of information in the eukaryotic cells, working the flesh from within. With her hair messed up and in her stocking feet, she reminded me again of what she no longer was, what she in no way still was: a big, old doll they’d left there, half rotten.

I took my leave of the coffee dregs and went down in that fabulous elevator. Outside, a splendid, stupid, limpid light awaited me, washing across the avenue.

I was dazed. The sky’s deserted plains, crisscrossed by the occasional urban bird (starlings, kestrels, gulls), seemed about to collapse onto my head. I took a detour away from the spacious solemnity of Bonanova and headed down a narrow street: low houses, damp patios, backyard smells, an almost rural landscape. Why was I mourning for that shitty apartment? None of our concerns stay with the furniture, none of the things that involve us; we can’t bequeath our personalities. Not even streets like Bonanova or Mandri or Iradier, which we’ve walked a thousand times, know anything about me or about Dad. We are welcomed into those apartments for years, they love us there, they are the backbone of our world. Then they become small, we leave them behind, furniture is brought in and carted away, the walls are painted, the old tenants die and the new tenants die, too, and no one says a word about whoever used to live there. The future is an expanse of homes where we paint nothing. The future is a city full of houses where we no longer live.

I walked for half an hour and then took a break in one of those dirty, sandy squares that dot the city, with their benches of dead wood that nothing can ever grow from again, and their grungy pigeons. I sat down at a pavement café with aluminium furniture and ordered a gin and tonic. I was finding it a bit warm.

I leaned my head back: the leaves were falling coldly, clutching at their color. I closed my eyes, and the sensation was like being in one of those documentaries in which the camera approaches the water’s surface and then submerges to swim among a school of fish. I saw myself on the other side of time, submerged in the past. I couldn’t have been more than ten, Dad was turning the pages of the Ascot almanac, and Mother had one eye on the TV and the other on my sister as she played. It was a winter’s day, the apartment was warm, and I felt so startled by the way life was gently rocking that I went running down the hallway and threw myself against the bed. I shook myself hard, it was difficult to breathe, I felt fully in harmony with the moment, as if the people to whom I was important and who were important to me had each at their own pace reached an optimal point of ripeness, as if the pulp were straining against their skin, about to break through and spill out; I was afraid of that moment. It was joy at being in that home, at being male, bearing the name Joan-Marc, at having that father and that tall mother. It was completely absurd that the scene had to keep moving forward, and that no one could stamp it on the flesh of time.

I opened my eyes suddenly and saw a milky sun that emitted hardly any light. I left the money on the tray and took off my dark glasses, shook the crushed ice in the glass, the water escaping its solid form.

I went down a street that opened up like a black path between lithic buildings. The portion of sky I could see looked soft. As a boy I couldn’t abide change of any sort. When Dad shaved off his mustache I howled and pestered him until he let it grow again: dark dots first, then threads that wove together until they covered his lip. Since that afternoon when I’d tasted a satisfied life — a world where Mother was healthy and Dad lived and anything bad could be washed away with the right words — ambition and sex and all the other rabid impulses had done nothing but drive us apart. As hard as I try, I can’t keep the water in the bowl, the liquid spills at every step and all that’s left are the words testifying to those golden impressions, long since melted. But words don’t have substance or weight; they’re waves we can’t hold on to.

Three or four pedestrian crossings later I started to hear the noise of traffic, like the sound of an old and eager beast that hasn’t given up yet. I came out on Via Augusta, the cars moved forward in their lanes, the traffic lights lit the fumes from exhaust pipes. A gust of arid wind shook the bars’ awnings. The idea of returning to Rocafort made me nauseous; I decided to go along Muntaner, between shopwindows that reflected a serene dream as it passed. I felt drawn by the descending streets, their asphalt shone like trembling rivers. I was conscious of the danger if I kept going in that direction — I could end up in one of those neighborhoods where even if I didn’t have to show my passport, an interpreter would certainly come in handy. I felt like staying a while longer in the Eixample’s happy grid of streets, among its beveled corners, its shops selling liquor, stamps, weapons, coins, its luminous bars.

I went into Dry Martini because it had been years since I’d sat in one of those booths. Really I just wanted to go in and receive the cold, dry liquid like a knife in my throat. I stared into the depths of my soul to ask how I could be so critical with Mother: I had bemoaned how my filial love hadn’t been strong enough to get her up and back out into the heaving streets, and now, out of love for herself, she’d shaken off the apathy and had dragged her carcass out to socialize with her prosthetic friends. But I was only disturbed, shaky like jelly taken from its mold. I told myself it wasn’t the kind of recovery I wanted for her.

I don’t know why I changed tables. I went to sit at the back of the bar, and from there I observed the young couples, suspended between the extremes of human time, who had two full decades yet to squander before they reached my age. More or less at that instant I switched from my reasoning to another archetypal memory: as a boy I’d felt attracted by empty building plots, the cement blocks, the rubble of urban demolition. Mother thought I liked the cables, the twisted steel bars, the plastic blown around by the wind like a mischievous ghost. But what really transfixed me was a deep sense of indignation: I tried to use my mental strength to put the debris back in place, I tried to introduce some human warmth into the cold objects, I begged my mother to have someone take care of cleaning up the space. I dug my heels in, and I wouldn’t move on until they promised me.

I had to leave the Dry because I got paranoid that if I stayed there, sooner or later I’d run into Pedro-María. A smudge of a moon cast a soft and sad light, surrounded by darkening clouds, heavy with electricity. The air brushed by the pigeons’ wings was full of damp particles. I walked slowly, as if a sudden elephantiasis had transformed my feet and ankles into hooves, or as though I were stepping on ripe fruit. I watched as the buildings lost their color, I saw the purplish night approaching and the Agbar tower shining like a radiant monolith, so I kept on toward the creamy beach. I ended up in the Raval: foul-smelling streets, multicolored neon, baskets of fruit and vegetables, livid faces, dozens of dark shades of skin, beat-up suitcases, elderly whores made up to bring the old softness back to their eyes. I hadn’t planned to drink a drop more, and you couldn’t pay me to go into one of those dives, but an evil rain started to fall, and I am a man of the Castilian plain, a creature made for dry land. The joint I went into was tight, narrow, and had at least six corners. I put on a criminal expression so I wouldn’t clash with my surroundings. I counted my loose cash; I wouldn’t get out of this place without paying. Have you been in a dump like this, Dad? Did you ever set foot in this neighborhood? I ask because it strikes me as the perfect place to unclog the heart’s latrines. The advantage of having a ruined family is supposed to be that you won’t spend your life trying to fix small imperfections, that you’ve already shaken off hope’s impossible demands, but it’s not like that, how could it be like that, Dad? I still carry the weight of them all.

When I was a kid I didn’t even appreciate that I’d been granted a life all my own, so how could I ever have believed that others enjoyed a complete existence? I thought that when they left me they disappeared, waiting to be summoned back. I’d never seen a dead person, I had no experience of suffering or illness — those were problems that could be avoided if people just stayed near me, within my field of vision. My mother wouldn’t have believed it, but I asked her to stay with me a while longer at night so I could protect her. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, I was afraid of the damage the distance could do to her. Fortunately, I was gradually convinced that all those people breathed independently of me, that they were moving along their own paths.

Of course, all those paths are deadly, and only life survives itself. The passage of time washes the world, renews the earth, and although I recognize that it’s a fine idea, what good does it do us? What can we do to avoid feeling it so acutely? It would be best if sunlight worked like those legendary rivers that, as they wet the edges of the land, revive it — our breath should renew us. Really, it’s all about making room inside yourself, ever more room to erect the stage for a lifeless fantasy populated with bloodless visions. There were no more drops falling onto the pavement, it was just a passing shower. The gin scraped my throat, the boys were mulatto, and the girls had tattoos; I left a red bill on the table. Melancholy is a pretty poor currency when it comes to collecting for everything we leave behind. As a boy I’d also feared walking down the hallway, turning a doorknob slowly, and peering into a scene from the future. It wasn’t so much the fear of catching a glimpse of the everyday disgraces hidden behind the future’s curtain, but rather concern about how everything would have looked to those child’s eyes: my fights with Helen, Dad’s swaying body, my mother’s pills, the loneliness of the Rocafort attic. Now there would be no shock to it. Now I know that in the house of the past, everyone will be dead.

The sky was growing soft again, only one or two clouds floated by, lit by dusk. I left behind the labyrinth of Raval and crossed a park: masses of odorless vegetation, and a fountain where pink petals floated, soon to rot. From far away, the Towers reminded me again of two pieces of carved marble rising above a sea of shit. I walked through the Borne, which was getting busier again after the rain, and the globes of light hanging from the metal lampposts seemed to be waiting for a vapor of fog, a stagecoach. Punctuating the streets’ corridors, the train station appeared, then petrified official buildings, the School of Nautical Studies. The heavens were coloring slowly in a fugue of reds: intense, purple, edema reds. The downpour had excited the sea and it was moving restlessly, like a strange creature lifting and stretching portions of its body before plunging back down in sandy waves, a soft stairway. Two bicycles sped past me, and in the distance shone the dirty dampness of the Columbus monument, an extinguished lighthouse put there to dissuade travelers. I’d never wanted to come to this city, but in the end I like it — even the pigeons, so indescribably filthy, even the vulgar banana trees that scatter their allergen spores. The Catalan rumblings don’t bother me, neither does the secessionist drift. I’m only saying we’ve traveled some distance together already, and no one’s going to keep me from feeling like the city is mine, too, these neighborhoods stretching like nervous tissue from the bony spine of Diagonal. I saw two pregnant girls strolling arm in arm, sweet foreigners sipping from a soda can, the weight of children in their bellies, gestating bundles of time and new blood that will unspool into the future. That sight was all it took for my mind to turn to delicate thoughts. The last rays of sparkling red revealed the port’s ghostly outlines. Maybe when it gets dark it will be one of those nights when all you need is an amateur telescope to see the disk of Jupiter or some Venusian twinkles. But even ironclad Mars is exhausted, even the moon hangs at an immense height.

Still, I concentrated, in case one of those oscillations of the cosmos wrapping its folds of time would bring me the image of a pregnant Helen, a memory that didn’t include me. No such luck. Anyway it’s hard to imagine Helen willing to compromise her flirting with attractive men. The years pass faster for the body; the mind stays home (where else could it go?), but it doesn’t feel too comfortable there. Do you think any of these young girls, traipsing along the same roads as if they’d just been paved, ever stops to consider this: an old woman’s smile echoes the laughter of a girl who went up the stairs of her first European hotel, wearing her only dress, intent, with the help of a stranger, on changing the course of her life?

How’s it going, Helen? I imagine you as an old woman because I’m afraid of going out to find you in the real world, where you haven’t yet turned fifty. You’re out there, doing your thing, whatever it is, and sometimes you’ll listen to and other times you’ll tune out the little voice that now and then talks to you about me. Over the years I’ve thought I caught your reflection in the window of the metro, in a puddle, in the treetops on summer nights. I hear certain words intoned in your voice (soirée, globo, váyaste, Daddy), and if something brushes against the sleeve of my jacket, almost two decades can be erased in a second. If I’m lucky, one of my hands touches you again in the Turret, above the roofs scattered out in the distance, while Daddy digs the cold grave of our separation.

I’m doing fine, abandoned, with too much sugar in my blood and some ridiculously low social security payments. I might look pathetic, but I’ll have you know I’m not done for yet. It’s just that it isn’t the way of the world for plans to unfold neatly, from the trembling idea all the way through to completion. It’s just that the agenda included bucketfuls of strife and weekly infusions of chaos. It’s just that I’ve only been playing at being the tough guy, Freckles; I said good-bye to all my friends, I married a woman you wouldn’t have liked, one we would have laughed at together under the sheets. I’ve treated my past as if my soul were a road covered in dry dust, but tonight, maybe because of the alcohol or the closeness of the sea, I feel like the earth is starting to open in wet channels and streams, and before long I’ll be gushing nostalgia. So let me celebrate your vitality, your naiveté, your cunning, your stupid opinions, the complicity with which you lifted a tit for me to suck on with all the force I had in the vain hope of making your body into a geyser, the malice with which you calculated my future weight, your keen gaze over the realm of the small that you couldn’t make the most of, because your head got loaded down with demands that were too much for you, because even though they’ve told me stories, and even though each is worse than the one before, when I was at your side I thought that because I was young and in love I could escape unscathed. And if you’ll allow me to be extravagant like in the old days, I will tell you now that today is the first day of the rest of my life. It’s been hard for me to get used to the idea that we move through existence shifting everything around, but this twilight is sharpening everything that’s happened recently. I want to grow as old as I can, old until my eyelids and ears fall off. If I survive this night, Freckles, I’ll make old age my new vocation.

I stumbled (quite literally) upon the new port. Clothes were hanging like bags of saline from the Barceloneta balconies. The kiosks and the shops were closed and you could mistake the sea’s edge for an abandoned pier. Until I reached the bars and restaurants, the night seemed made of dark atoms, not a speck of light. I was too drunk to recognize the constellations, and the stars seemed scattered by a careless hand. I finished my newest gin and tonic with a manly gulp and went to another bar, a terrace two or three meters above the sea’s wet bulk; the music wasn’t exactly Frank Sinatra. I just think a person should be able to dunk his heart into a vivifying liquid to hydrate its walls and arteries, and once it’s absorbed enough of the substance, we’d fit it back into place, and it could regenerate the body’s old tissues with new blood. The lights from the nightclubs traced harsh strokes over the dark area where the sea must have been heaving. An enormous German went by with a dog that stopped two meters from my table to scratch its ears. The names of animals are dark and there’s hardly anything beneath them. They can’t be other than what they are.

I heard the keening of a siren; at that hour, with the alcohol churning in my stomach and saturating the spongy tissues of my liver, my stomach and pancreas, the stroboscopic lights of the ambulances and police vans were frightening, like the first signs of an alien invasion. The night is a sentinel, was my rough impression, but its eye is imperturbable, and no one worries about tying up what is unleashed, or holding back what is set loose. Then I shook my glass to watch the liquid swirl, and I saw my mother again in the apartment she’d sold behind my back. And this time it occurred to me that every one of us is constantly broadcasting ghostly programs in his radio-brain, millions of shows for a single, exclusive listener, interminable nocturnal samplings with which we debate, shock, deform, accuse, and deflect our little patch of the shared world. So tell me, how are we to come to an agreement about the right recovery for everyone? How do we find the frequency where all those confused, discrete stories traveling along separate rails can crystallize into a vision that benefits all who matter, without leaving a single one outside the mystical circle of benevolence? You don’t know, of course, no one does. But I think that is how we’re living, driven by a dark inertia to separate from each other, and no one can renew anything. What is past is broken, what is broken can never be put back together.

The music (“De pequeñita yo soñe…As a girl I dreamed/love was a good thing/and it was all a lie”) was making me feel sentimental (“everything’s casual for you/thrill-seeker”). I raised my hand, intending to order the gin and tonic that would floor me once and for all, when the firmament exploded in fireworks that unfurled yellow, green, and blue palm trees in space. I heard a stabbing in my heart, the deep voice of the sea. I had to stand up because — among other shameful reasons — somewhere you are alive and you’re breathing, even if you’re sleeping now, and that is good.

The sea roiled in the moonlight, and across its body flashed lashes of color that faded quickly away; they looked like electrical spasms shivering in a brain, traces of thoughts. The world moved around me in slow spirals, and no one could convince me that what lay on the other side of that wet skin was just a pit infested with chemical algae and poison salt, that it wasn’t a friendly dimension beckoning me toward a past in harmony with all my fickle, shifting desires. And as I leaned toward those waters that were almost baptismal, that could cleanse me of all my roots, dirt, and worn-out veins, I thought how the wave spreading out from impact will reach you wherever you are, open your eyes, and compel you to partake in a renewal so urgent that it calls upon our very civil responsibility to propagate it. Because you tell me, my love (let me call you that one last time before I sink): if all you women go crazy, who will be left to take care of us?

A Note About the Author

Gonzalo Torné is the author of two previous novels published in Spain, for which he won the Premio Jaén de Novela and was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Narrativa. He has also translated work by William Wordsworth and John Ashbery into Spanish. He lives in Barcelona.

Content

Gonzalo Torne
Divorce Is in the Air

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A Note About the Author