Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

‌Not Everyone Gets to Choose How They Die, Alba

‘It was Friday two weeks ago,’ Valentino told me on one of the days he drove me to school. ‘Alba Cambó and I met up at ten that morning and went for a spin in the car. They were playing Vivaldi on the radio. I had pushed the top back and it was a lovely day, the kind of day when the air smells of figs, salt water and sweet exhaust fumes. Alba was sitting in the same place you are now, her head against the neck-rest, looking up at the roofs as we drove through the streets and avenues. I recognised the music they were playing on the radio and hummed along to it while driving. I could never make love to Vivaldi, Alba said at that point. Vivaldi’s beautiful, don’t you think, I said. That’s why, she said. Imagine making love to the Gloria. Only saints can do that, and saints aren’t supposed to make love. Saints should be saintly. I thought about what it would be like to make love to Vivaldi. Maybe she was right. Maybe it wasn’t for people like us to make love to Vivaldi. It’s the sort of thing some people are able to do while others can’t. In any case it didn’t matter in the slightest at that moment. I had no intention of asking her to make love to Vivaldi. I was planning to ask her something else entirely. I was wondering how I should put it. I wanted to say something really big, something really important, only no matter how I tried to word it, it sounded banal. Since the first time I saw you. On the beach in San Remo. It sounded banal. San Remo sounded banal. It is a banal town, but that was where we met. Ever since I met you, Alba, it’s as though a bird has lodged itself in my heart and built a nest. It’s the bird of love. It’s you. That sounded banal as well, only then it struck me that the banal is sometimes what’s most true. I was going to tell the truth and even if the truth sounded banal, I was going to say it anyway. That was the price I was prepared to pay for telling the truth. I went over the different ways of putting it again and again. I kept thinking I’m going to turn towards her and say it now. But when I had finally mustered the courage, I saw she had fallen asleep.

We parked near Pla del Born. She woke up and we walked around on the lookout for a good restaurant. We kept walking, and it felt as though Vivaldi’s notes were dancing in my ears. Could you make love to this? I thought. Maybe if you were very old or very young. We sat at a bar and ordered drinks. We raised our glasses to each other and drank. The alcohol filled us up and made us happy. We started teasing each other. Then all of a sudden she put on a serious face and said: Valentino, do you want to marry me? And I couldn’t take it in. I really couldn’t take it in at all. This wasn’t how I had imagined it. It was meant to be my question. In my world, it’s the man who pops the question. In my world there are certain things the man has to ask and that’s not because I’m old-fashioned but because everything turns out better that way. Who wants a feminist woman in his bed? Who wants a feminist man in her bed? We should always endeavour to be someone else when we make love. That’s the only way out. She shouldn’t have said it, I thought, and Vivaldi kept dancing in my ears; something about the situation would go wrong now. You see, Alba, I said, I wasn’t expecting that. I really wasn’t expecting that. I’d imagined something different. I’d pictured something else entirely. I understand, she answered. You were the one who was supposed to say it. I got in before you. That’s right, I said. You look so sad, she said and reached up to stroke my cheek. Where’s the champagne? I thought.

We went walking round again, without a plan and without any pleasure either. We did not return to the question. We simply pretended it didn’t exist. We walked along little streets and there was ivy hanging here and there. We came to a dusty little shop selling old clothes and things. Let’s go in, said Alba. As we opened the door, the smell of mildew hit us. Pots, pedestals, busts, stuffed birds, a boar’s head and fabrics in bold colours were scattered about indiscriminately. Behind the counter was an old lady with grey hair in a bun who looked at us suspiciously as we moseyed around. Alba opened a cupboard and a pile of clothes slid out onto the floor. She started lifting up one garment after the other. She picked up an antique shawl and a small jacket with gold embroidery. What’s this? she asked the woman behind the counter. From the estate of someone who just died, she answered dryly. They only came in an hour ago and I haven’t had time to put them on hangers yet. They belonged to an old aficionado and his wife. She added the last bit reluctantly as though she didn’t consider us worthy of the information. She stepped behind a curtain and started fiddling with something and after a few seconds the sounds of Nisi Dominus issued from the loudspeakers. Alba looked up at me and smiled. Do you hear that? Yes, I said. So now we know what we’re not going to do, she said, and continued rooting through the pile of clothes. I just stood there. She asked me to come over. Put this on, she said, holding up the goldwork jacket. No, I said. I refuse to put on the clothes of someone who’s just died. If you want to try them on, you can change behind the curtain, said the lady. I don’t want to try them on, I replied. It felt as if drooping spiderwebs were entering my ears. There was itching all over my upper body. He died of a broken heart, the woman said. What a dull way to die, said Alba. Not everyone gets to choose how they die, the other woman replied. I just don’t understand what you can do with all this, I said. Everything is old and dusty. It feels unhygienic. These are lovely garments, the woman said then, and her eyes seemed to glitter in the half-light. Aha! Alba laughed. There speaks the mighty Thor, who kills bulls with his bare hands but is scared of a few fleas. And the old girl behind the counter laughed as well, and I could see she didn’t have any teeth. Her mouth was a black hole, a helter-skelter ride down to something that had no shape or form. That’s right, I said, the mighty Thor has spoken, and tried to laugh along with them. Alba was rummaging around behind the curtain. Then she drew it to one side and stood there wreathed in lace and with a hat on her head. She wasn’t wearing anything on top and you could see her breasts. Alba, I said. Put something on. Just give it a rest, she said. You really should cheer up. I could feel something touching my arm and jerked away before realising that it was the woman who had crept up beside me. The smell of old age seemed to waft from her and I moved a step further. So lovely, she said and her toothless mouth smiled broadly. That scarf was just lying there waiting for a woman like you. It was then I noticed that she was holding a silver tray in her hands with liqueur glasses containing something transparent. Do try it, she said and offered the tray to me. No thank you, I said. Go on, she said as her smile vanished. Just take it, Alba said, standing there in the black lace. Bloody old cow, I thought, draining the contents of the glass and then slamming it back down on the tray with a bang. Bloody old cow and her smelly dead-people-clothes. Come on Alba, let’s go, I said. Not until you’ve tried on the matador jacket and stood beside me for a photo, she replied. She crossed her arms and looked defiant. The old woman held out the tray to her and she took a glass. On one condition, I said then. That we leave afterwards. Immediately. Of course, said Alba. We shouldn’t spend too long in the air in here in any case. The other woman nodded and didn’t seem the slightest bit offended.

I took off my shirt and struggled into the gold jacket. The old lady’s hands wove across me like the fingers of a spiderwoman, fastening buttons and adjusting loops. Then she and Alba stood in front of me and looked me over with a critical eye. There’s something missing, the old woman said and went over to root through the pile. She returned with a cape that she swept across my shoulders. Then she removed a sword from an umbrella stand and put it under my arm. That’s it, she said. Let’s take the picture now. Alba handed her the camera and then came and stood next to me. Smile, she said. I tried out a tentative smile. The old woman took the picture. Alba got her camera back, and we looked at the image. I smiled when I saw us, despite the situation. And whenever I have looked at the picture since, I have noticed the assurance in my gaze, the indolent self-confidence in hers. Me as a matador and her as a prostitute. That was the way we were going to live. Full on, flat out and no teasing the brakes. Wholeheartedly. Otherwise why bother? We would live life even if it killed us. That was what we would do and that was the moment I realised it. Alba Cambó and I would live life, even if it killed us.

I struggled out of the coat and the jacket. Everything seemed to smell of elderly, mildewed man. Alba was still preening in front of the mirror. The old woman kept staring at her. Her mouth was half open, she had put down the tray and her arms hung loose along her sides. Come on, I said. Alba finally got changed while chatting with the other woman. The old lady was answering in hoarse monosyllables while peering intently at Alba. Thank you, this was fun, Alba said as we walked towards the door. Wait! the woman called. You must take the lace with you. You can have it, it belongs to you. Alba wound it around her throat and then shook hands with her. Then we stepped out onto the street and I could sense that the old woman was still standing there following us with her eyes, but I didn’t want to turn round.

Something had changed when we got out into the fresh air. We felt happier. It might have been the liqueur, maybe the oxygen, but all the gloom suddenly seemed to have been lifted. We walked back and forth along the streets. We went into a bar and had several drinks. We talked about music you could make love to. The Verve, said Alba. I don’t know who they are, I said. Nor do I, she said, only I’ve heard they’re good for that purpose. We laughed. We walked on. We went into a restaurant and ordered grilled prawns. Everything was perfect. It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t too cold, the cava slipped beautifully down our throats. Alba was sitting there with the black lace around her throat, saying apparently unconnected things like: “I can’t understand why men are so fond of sex,” and “Once I saw a skull in the water when I was swimming off Palmarola,” and “When the main problem people have is that lack of lightness, it’s all over for them.” I just sat there nodding. Is that right, I would say. And I made no comment on her comments about sex. As for the skull, I told her I had seen a skull too, on Sardinia, only it wasn’t floating around but in the cliffs. I had swum a bit away from the shoreline and turned around which is when I saw it in the rock face. The black holes of its eyes were staring at me. So I know what you’re talking about, I said, you get this kind of tingling feeling in your toes when you’ve got a thousand cubic metres of water underneath you and you look towards land and see a skull. We continued in this vein, confused and drunk, and most of what we said was disconnected and meaningless but we were finally happy again and felt grateful for that.

The waiter was friendly and came over with our prawns. He put out bread, and all around us people were murmuring at the other tables but no one was loud or disturbing. I just can’t believe what a great time we’re having, I said and Alba nodded and stuffed a prawn into her mouth. So great we should feel guilty. You’re so right, I said. We groped one another under the table. We talked about going to the cinema just to be able to neck for a bit undisturbed. A bad film, at the very back of the stalls. We ordered elderberry sorbet and daiquiris. Alba took a joint out of her bag and smoked it, and the waiter didn’t seem to care. After a while I felt that the time was ripe to return to the question. So what about getting married? I said. We’ll get married in May, she said dreamily while blowing out smoke. We’ll marry in Albarracín in May. The poplar trees along the river will have just come into leaf. And the sun won’t have scorched the earth. Everything will be warm and expectant. We’ll be able to paddle down in the ravine and eat long dinners at open-air restaurants. We’ll be able to make love in the Castilian four-poster beds at a parador.

Although I’d never been in Albarracín, I could see it in my mind’s eye. A little village on a mountain. A ravine, poplars whose leaves twist in the wind and rustle softly. Black, heavy beds, black velvet, closed shutters, narrow strips of light that creep in during the hours of daylight. I could see it all before me and it was as though I had always been there, in Albarracín, as though I had always wandered the surrounding hills with the wind in my face, and the views. No lowlands. No tired cattle roving around. Just mighty birds hurling themselves into the air. Yes, we will, I said and my eyes filled with tears. Is it legal to be this happy? I laid my head on her shoulder. She stroked my cheek. They’ll be tossing us into the dungeons soon, she said. When you’re this happy, it can only ever be the last circle.

For a few hours I was convinced that I was, or at least could be, that happy. I looked out of the corner of my eyes at her walking by my side. I thought about the soft leather of her boots and the way it wrapped round her ankles, the tights that accompanied her body up to the navel. In my mind I traced every promontory and every valley along her. I could see before me how we would wake beside one another every morning from this moment on. As thrilled as it was envious, the world would look on. Time would stop as we passed by. I could see it all, and for a few hours I managed to forget completely the impossibility of the equation.

But at some point the day started to go downhill. I don’t know exactly when, but it was after we had paid and were just about to get up and go. It was then that the day fell flat with as much grace as a wounded crow. The energy drained out of me and Alba was slumped listlessly across the table. I even think the sun went behind a cloud. That was the good bit, Alba said. Don’t forget we’re getting married in Albarracín, I said. Don’t worry, I’m not going to forget that. But they mustn’t play Vivaldi. I tried to laugh and felt the wine fumes back up into my mouth. I got up and went to the toilet. It was filthy and someone had urinated beside the seat. I stood there and peed. I went back out to Alba again and she had got up and was standing there waiting, looking strained and reproachful, as though she was thinking where have you been all this time. We walked around. I looked at the clock and it was quarter to five. Which meant it was exactly four hours before the call from the hospital. How did we while away the hours? I don’t remember. I think we felt cold even though it was hot. I remember that we moved out of the shadows and into the sunlight and I remember that we moved once again when the sun was blocked by a building that cast a shadow over us. I think maybe the conversation faltered and that talking began to be a bit of an effort, that we started to feel we had to last it out. I think I even wondered when the day would ever end, when we could go home go to bed and put out the light.

When the call finally came, evening had fallen. We had eaten again, at a different restaurant and this time just soup and some fruit and a bottle of still mineral water. Her mobile rang. She looked at the display, got up and went out. I remember thinking: who is this person she can’t talk to in front of me? When we’ll soon be sharing everything? I could see her back from the table by the window. She was in the foyer and the waiters were moving round her carrying their trays. She was standing absolutely still. I fiddled with the ashtray and the toothpick container. The salt cellar had swollen rice grains in it. They looked like maggots. She came back, pulled out the chair in front of me and said, That was the hospital calling. They’ve got the results of my tests and it looks as though it’s malignant. What is? I said. The tumour, she answered. You never mentioned any tumour. Didn’t I? I thought I’d told you. Well, you hadn’t. Really, that’s odd. In any case it has spread and they think it’s too late to operate. I laughed, thinking it was all a joke. They don’t tell you things like that from the hospital. Not at night, not something like that over the phone. Not when two people are feeling so happy. Yes they do, said Alba. They didn’t want to tell me at first but then I lied and said I was abroad and wouldn’t be home for another four weeks. So then they told me. Her face looked as though it had been carved out of white stone. Her jaws moved slightly. Only, I said. Only. I didn’t know what to say. We were going to, I mean. Albarracín. The poplars and the ravine. Time was going to stand still. Albarracín. In my mind’s eye I could see a pair of cogs that had trapped a piece of flesh and were grinding it down. I tried to visualise something else. The future. The poplars. The leaves twisting in the light. The waiters walked past. One of them opened a window. The sounds from the square outside entered the restaurant. I could hear a man telling off a child, I could smell roasted chestnuts. A woman was laughing loudly. The church bells struck. I sat there thinking: the smell of chestnuts, a man telling off a child, the bells striking nine. This is how it is. It’s nine o’clock and there’s nothing to say I have to stop loving her.’

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Not that Valentino’s story was the first I had heard of Alba Cambó. Our initial impression of her would be based almost entirely on what we read in the magazine Semejanzas. The same day she moved in below us (we realised that someone had come to stay because the broken pots and abandoned crowbar that had lain down there for as long as we could remember were suddenly gone and in their place were two individuals having a conversation while the aroma of exotic food found its way up to us), Mum went to the market to find out what was going on. No one knew anything at the market that afternoon apart from the fact that there had been a moving van in the street the day before, and that things had been unloaded and that a woman who must have been Alba Cambó had stood there keeping a watchful eye on the moving men as they handled her boxes. This was not enough for Mum, however, and she went down to the market again the next morning. A few hours later she came home with the latest issue of Semejanzas, which she had walked all the way up to Fnac near Pla Catalunya to buy. We leafed through the glossy pages. First there was a feature about a man who devoted himself to the illegal fishing of mussels in the estuary outside Vigo, followed by an interview with a prominent writer from Madrid whose name I can no longer remember but whose photo etched itself deeply into my brain because of a minor detail in the background: the muzzle of a pistol peering out from a bookshelf. Then there it was, the piece written by our new neighbour. A picture was included of a woman smiling and looking at someone outside the image, and there couldn’t be the slightest doubt it was her. Mum read her short story aloud. Nineteen pages long, it was about an extremely lonely man in the district of Poblenou. The man had no name in the short story but was referred to simply as ‘the man’. He was described as rather short with thinning hair and large, slightly staring eyes that looked enormously unhappy. The man’s problem was that he had been alone for so long that he had slowly but surely begun to develop a social phobia. Initially the phobia was nothing more than a vague reluctance to engage with other people, a reluctance that was manifested for the most part by his staying away from meetings with people he knew and regretfully declining invitations to family gatherings. But the problem rapidly developed into something else, something that could no longer be ignored and that imposed severe limitations on the way he lived his life. The clearest evidence that the man in the short story actually suffered from a phobia and not just from a common or garden aversion to the world around him was that he was no longer capable of eating without embarrassment in the company of other people. His hands shook so much that the food dropped off his fork and the fork would sometimes then fall out of his hands and onto the plate, landing with what sounded to him like a deafening clatter. His embarrassment was immediately evident in the colour of his face. Sometimes the man would even blush when there was not the slightest reason to do so, which meant that other people’s eyes were drawn to him, making both the situation and his phobia worse. His nearest and dearest were most concerned. Finally his daughter arranged a surprise party for him. His sixtieth birthday was coming up and his daughter thought this would be a good occasion to gather friends and family together. Perhaps a large social gathering might also alleviate some of her father’s phobia? She had heard that exposure to the objects that trigger phobias was always a positive thing. The daughter managed to get a group of about forty people together. They were all standing there in the dark in the hall of the man’s flat in Poblenou one evening as he made his way home from work. The man opened the door in the same slow and effortful way he always did. The forty people could hear the key being turned in the lock, the man putting down his briefcase on the floor in the hall and closing the door behind him. For a second or two there was absolute silence. You could have heard a pin drop in the darkness, the daughter would say a few pages later in the short story. All the guests held their breath while they waited for a signal from the daughter to burst into a chorus of congratulations, to the accompaniment of the light from the ceiling lamp which had been wreathed in coloured paper along with streamers and confetti that would be thrown up into the air to rain down over him. But just before the daughter could give them the green light, the socially phobic man farted. He was easing the pressure in his stomach, a pressure that had been building up throughout the day at the featureless office the man worked at, a pressure that Cambó described as a kind of internal and repressed rebellion against the beige-coloured walls and the white, rather damp faces that are typical of many fat people, people who never spend time in the open air, and people who eat nothing but sausage, if such people exist, that is. The sound that came out of the man was lengthy and sustained. It echoed between the walls and was drawn out into a kind of lamentation; it was then transformed into the cry that issues from the gullet of a bird one evening on some isolated mountain lake, and was finally followed by a sigh of relief. The daughter stood there paralysed in the darkness. The whole thing fell apart. The signal for the festivities to begin was not given despite the fact that the noises of celebration might have drowned out bodily sounds. A smell of sewage slowly spread through the hall. After several more seconds (Cambó managed to make the duration of these seconds appear to be an eternity) the daughter gave the go-ahead, and the guests began their gaudy congratulations. But the congratulations were only half-hearted. Derailed, embarrassed congratulations, congratulations characterised by shame, embarrassment and sorrow. Some ill-concealed giggling could also be heard from the youngest female members of the family. The eyes of the guests kept shifting about and a murmuring started up although the voices doing the murmuring sounded uncertain. Bright red, the man stood on the threshold with his briefcase pressed against his chest like armour. He asked his daughter to gather together all the guests and get them to leave his flat immediately. He refused to see them and went into the toilet where he locked the door and sat absolutely motionless on the toilet seat until he heard the door close behind the last of the guests. The story ended one week later with the daughter finding her father hanging from a beam in the sitting room, rigid in death although wearing newly polished shoes, a ludicrous attention to detail that would be his last.

It was stated that Alba Cambó had won a prize for the short story and that the jury had referred to ‘shame’, ‘loneliness’ and ‘the predicament of the modern man’ in their verdict. The prize was worth €1,000, and she said in an interview in the same issue that she was going to use the money to construct a garden on her terrace, which she seemed to have put off for some time as during the coming months we saw no sign of a garden or of any increase in the number of pots down there.

A month or two after we had read the story of a lonely man, another short story written by Alba Cambó was published in the same periodical. Mum bought this one as well. It was about a little boy who had been kidnapped from Majadahonda, a residential district for the better-off on the outskirts of Madrid. The search for the boy went on for days and weeks, but he was never found. Finally a call came from the man who had stolen the boy. The family was asked to pay a ransom. A week or two later the kidnapper was found in a rubbish bag. He had been brutally murdered; his arms had been cut off and, according to the autopsy that had been carried out, they had been cut off while he was still alive. He had also been subjected to sexual abuse. The boy was never found. This was a peculiar short story with rather a lot of loose ends — why, for example, had the man made his presence known and why should the reader believe that it was the boy who had led the killing of the man when there could just as well have been another kidnapper involved? Nor was there anything to suggest that the boy remained alive as well. There was an interview with Alba Cambó alongside this short story too. In it she said that the entertainment value of a violated female body was infinite and inexhaustible and that in writing about violated male bodies her aim was to explore the kind of entertainment value they offered. Rather unwisely she pre-empted the journalist’s questions by wondering rhetorically what was wrong with depicting violated male bodies when women’s bodies were continually being used in literature for that purpose? Some writers wrote like lazily masturbating monkeys in overheated cages, she said. They wrote as though they had lost the taste for the real flavours of a dish and had to keep adding salt and pork fat in order to make it taste of anything. Raped and murdered women here, raped and murdered women there, that was the only way the readers’ interest could be kept alive, said Alba Cambó.

The editor of the magazine had fixed on what she said about lazily masturbating monkeys. Alba Cambó on Lazily Masturbating Monkeys was written in bold above her image. This picture of her was not a particularly successful one. She was shown at an angle from the front with her lips slightly apart, an expression that actually made her look a bit retarded, even though Alba Cambó was not an ugly woman in reality. Mum said it was an unfortunate picture and an unfortunate piece of writing and that Alba Cambó might have gone a bit too far in what she said. In any case we both agreed that the first short story was better than the second. Mum put them both in a drawer in her bedroom where she kept magazine articles, obituaries and other things she felt somehow had to do with us.

Apart from the writing and the interviews there didn’t seem to be anything special about Alba Cambó. She fit in to the everyday life that was typical of the neighbourhood without any difficulty. Her hair was bleached and in rather poor condition, she was not in the first flush of youth and often had too much black around her eyes. She had a hoarse voice: it might have been the alcohol or the tobacco smoke that had damaged it, Mum thought. She was not particularly friendly and never initiated a conversation. On some days you would see her with one man and on other days with someone else. One of the men was tall and dark and said hello in a friendly way if you met on the stairs, although he never started up a conversation either. All of which made it difficult for us to form an image of Alba Cambó in those first few months. But her ceiling was our floor, and there was only a set of beams a foot or so thick separating our lives. This was something I often heard Mum say during the period following the publication of Alba’s first two stories. After all there’s only twelve inches separating our lives, she might exclaim on the phone or over a glass of wine one evening. We could hear the water rushing through the pipes when Alba Cambó flushed the toilet, and when she had a drink we could hear the tiny thud as the glass was put down on the surface of the counter. I am sure Mum entertained various notions about Alba Cambó she didn’t confide to me because even though I had read both the short stories I was far from being a sufficiently experienced conversational partner when it came to certain subjects. I think though that she must have spoken about Alba with some of her male acquaintances because on several occasions when one of them came to dinner, conversation would fall silent around the table when the sound of heels could be heard from the terrace below. The eyes of both Mum and her friend then turned towards the railing where they remained fixed as though they were both, each in their own way, visualising a version of Alba Cambó and what she was doing down there.

The building we lived in, and which I still write in, is located on Calle Joaquín Costa not far from the Universitat metro station. It is two storeys tall, built sometime in the 1940s, and has never been renovated. On the street outside shades of grey shift across the trunks of plane trees that look as though they have been attacked by scabies. But their leafy tops are healthy and in the spring they are light green; they darken in the summer and are shot through with warmer colours in the autumn. During the winter they are bare for a few months, but winters in Barcelona are short and mild and after a while the trees turn light green again. The foliage moves back and forth in the wind that comes in off the sea in the mornings and smells of seaweed and salt. On some days there is a tinge of oil in the air, from the port presumably. Even in those days our terrace was an oasis. Mum spent all her free mornings and evenings there. On it she had a deck chair and a round table where she would put a glass of wine while she smoked. From our terrace you could see part of the terrace below because it was slightly larger than ours and stuck out a bit more.

Our apartment was better on the outside than in. In Mum’s room you could see damp spots starting to form on the ceiling, and although my room was small it had a high ceiling, which made you feel as though you were sleeping in a can. The only window in the room overlooked a tiny inner courtyard. It was no more than a space for refuse really, and a means of letting light in, and had not been painted since the house was built. So my view consisted of a smooth dirty-grey surface the same colour as Blu-Tack or papier mâché. The whole building smelled in a way I believed at that time was the smell of an ordinary building but which I later realised was the smell of mould. And even though the refuse truck came every evening and the refuse space got disinfected, some vermin managed to survive. The cockroaches were red, several centimetres long, and had wings they could half-fly with. You would suddenly see them on the doorframe while you were brushing your teeth, and they would sit there calm and composed while washing their long reddish-brown antennae with their legs. The invasions were worse at the beginning of the summer and tailed off towards its end. Mum told me she had read a book by a Basque writer who suggested you should call cockroaches by name, which would make them impossible to kill. She experimented with calling one of them José María, and it really was impossible for her afterwards to crush him under her foot. This led to our having rather a lot of José Marías running over the floors on summer nights. Once I stepped on one as I was going to the toilet at night. Feeling its body scrabbling against my foot was revolting, and it was after that I decided to take things into my own hands. One night when Mum was at a friend’s, I went on the attack with a spray I had bought at the Chinese shop on the corner. I turned on the light, shifted the sofa and got spraying. Afterwards I could see them dying with their legs in the air like the sails of little windmills. As I swept them up I felt a pang of guilt that Mum’s José María probably lay among the cadavers. But new José Marías were bound to turn up, because there was an inexhaustible supply somewhere, and Mum would never have to miss her late friend.

There were maggots in the building as well although in their case Mum never suggested giving them names. It was almost impossible to get the better of these maggots, the caretaker said, because they seemed able to lay their eggs even in cement. They were everywhere and their shed skins turned up in flour bags and rice containers and on stale bits of bread. Eventually they turned into small moth-like creatures that were drawn to the light. You wouldn’t see them for a very long while, and then suddenly, as you were having your supper on the terrace or in the sitting room, talking about something nice and Mum might be sharing a bottle of wine with someone, a winged insect would come fluttering through the air like a reminder that their nests were still going strong and that the refuse space would never be entirely clean.

If any of the men friends who came to see Mum brought up the state of the apartment (they might, for instance, say it was nice but that the need for renovation appeared pressing if not to say urgent), Mum used to reply that yes, the flat we lived in was like a sinking boat. Just as you plugged one hole, another one burst open.

‘One fine day,’ she would say, ‘the water will flood in and it will sink to the bottom.’

She even joked about the need for renovation now and then and used to call the flat ‘our castle, our grave and maybe our mausoleum’. The men laughed incredulously when they heard her say things like that. Presumably they thought she had some kind of plan up her sleeve after all, and that a gang of craftsmen would arrive one day and knock down the plaster, break up the old flooring and take down the damp-stained ceilings. And they probably thought this woman needs a man, and perhaps just for a second or two they imagined what life would be like for them living with us, how long it would take them to get to work, where they would put their computers and their bookshelves, how much of the mortgage remained to be paid off, that they might be able to write the book they had always dreamed of writing in exchange for lending a practical hand and a bit of masculine glamour — ideas that might flicker past for a moment before vanishing. But not one of them ever took any practical initiative and I think they were wise to keep their distance from us. We weren’t a good match if it was financial freedom they were after. Mum’s salary working for the local government was hardly enough for any kind of extravagance and we lived on soups made of carrots, potatoes and chickpeas. We did eat meat, although, like the working classes of old, only on Sundays. Mum would often leave the soup-pot simmering for hours just like it was supposed to in the ancient recipes she worked from and which were based on the principle that many cheap ingredients could be made into something special provided they were allowed to cook together for long enough. The smell of those endless simmers found its way into all the nooks and crannies of the flat and seeped into our clothes as well, which was worse. Sometimes when I was away from home I would suddenly become aware of that smell of overcooked food. What’s that odour like mouldy old blankets, I might think, only to realise that the smell came from me. But there was a kind of pride in enduring, in bearing your cross and imagining that you were like a larva in its cocoon, trapped for now maybe but one day, one fine day, you would spread your wings and burst out and then everything would be utterly different. You couldn’t exactly imagine what it would be like, but it would be totally different and that was all that mattered. Meanwhile our motto had to be that we made the best of what we had. And if you had nothing, then you made the best of that too.

We continued to be curious about Alba Cambó, who published several more short stories in Semejanzas. Some of them were really violent, and frequently the violence was perpetrated by women and children against men. According to one of Mum’s male friends, a psychologist who taught at the Complutense University of Madrid, Alba Cambó’s short stories were unnatural and based on falsehoods about the human psyche in general and the male psyche in particular. The stuff about the psyche was not something we could judge. But we bought the magazines and kept them in the box for newspaper cuttings. I also think that Alba Cambó won some more awards, which led to some rather merry parties on her terrace, parties where people smoked marijuana, sang and laughed while we sat up there listening in the semi-darkness. She continued her excessive lifestyle well into the night as well. She did not come home until the early hours and always slept until late.

‘A real woman with a real life,’ Mum once said about Alba Cambó, and there was no mistaking a note of envy in her voice.

It wasn’t until a few days after she moved in that we realised Alba Cambó had not moved in alone. A new nameplate on the post box in the hall informed us that Alba Cambó Altamira and Blosom Gutiérrez Gafas now lived in the flat below. We saw Blosom that same evening, when we found her to be beautiful, black-skinned, and seemingly reserved and rather large. Mum said that she must be Alba’s personal assistant because she had to come from somewhere in Central America to judge by her accent. We would soon discover that she was just as uncommunicative as Alba Cambó herself, and never said hello if you happened to meet her on the street. She would stride past instead with an expression that declared ‘I know you are there but I have no intention of saying hello because we do not know one another.’ Her solemn and dignified manner (Mum referred to it as carrying her tail in the air) made it impossible to take the first step and start up a conversation of any kind. All the same she and Mum did begin talking one afternoon at the grocer’s. I have no idea what they talked about in the shop but when Mum came home the focus of her attention had shifted from Alba to her home help. Mum screwed together the coffee maker in the kitchen and, while she was putting out the cup and the sugar bowl, she said that observing Alba wasn’t particularly rewarding because she almost always sat still down there with paper and pen and a furrowed brow. The only action Cambó performed was focused on a cup she had beside her and which she drank from now and then, a movement not at all inspiring to a possible observer. Blosom, on the other hand, always had something going on. She hummed, laid the table, looked after the potted plants or laughed out loud at things she heard on the television or the radio in the living room. She shifted her body around in the heat in leisurely fashion, picking at Alba’s pots, removing dried leaves and watering them with the hose once the sun had gone down, so as not — as the women of the neighbourhood used to say — to burn the plants with water during the heat of the day. Sometimes she would go round with a pair of clippers, taking a bit off this plant and then that, moving some of Alba’s pots around and taking dirty wine glasses into the kitchen. From time to time she filled up the water in the little basin Alba had put up on one of the walls. Mum said that Blosom had acquired the habit of dipping her fingers very quickly into the little pool every so often when she passed it and then making the sign of the cross — it was a habitual movement, a reflex drummed in over years, decades maybe, and we wondered what Blosom’s religion actually was. There was a kind of stiffness to her way of making the sign of the cross, the kind of stiffness that comes with learned behaviours that have never become entirely natural to the person who has learnt them.

In the daytime Mum would sometimes hear Blosom and Alba talking while Blosom hung out the washing. They chatted like two girlfriends or sisters and there didn’t seem to be any differences between them then; when you shut your eyes and listened you couldn’t tell who was the mistress and who the servant. If Mum went close to the railing she could see Blosom bend over the washing basket and pick up an item of clothing or a sheet, and then stand up and peg the fabric to the clothes line. When she bent down again her buttocks could be seen straining against the material of her dress, and they were large, soft and round with the fabric stretched across them, damp with her sweat. I’ve never ever seen buttocks like that, said Mum. Sometimes it looked to her as though the cloth might split and those buttocks would then bloom through the hole in her dress. That was what she imagined, Blosom’s enormous buttocks suddenly bursting forth through a split in her skirt. And that wasn’t some sort of indecent fantasy, Mum said as if to defend herself, it was the only thing you could think as someone observing the situation: all that fabulous physicality in all its magnificence.

Soon, though, it was at night that the real encounters between Mum and Blosom took place, if you could refer to real encounters at this point. Because once the door had shut behind Alba, Blosom would start clearing the dinner things. She went back and forth between the table on the terrace and the kitchen; you could hear her piling plates and dishes on top of one another. Then it was her turn to go out onto the terrace with a glass of wine. First she wiped her neck and arms with a wet cloth and her breathing was strained as though she had been for a very long walk or a run. Then she relaxed. Her powerful arms lay along her body, her stomach distended and her gaze lost in the windows of the building opposite. From the chair Mum sat in she could see Blosom’s matted black hair sticking up just a few metres below. Mum used to sit there in absolute silence from fear that Blosom would think she was spying. Half an hour would pass in this way, an hour, sometimes even longer. Mum even wondered sometimes whether Blosom had fallen asleep down there. But then all of a sudden Blosom would get up, take the dirty wine glass with her into the flat and Mum would get up too and do the same.

At that time we used to buy our clothes at a market in Poblenou. I don’t know why we went all the way to Poblenou to shop for clothes, there were cheaper places nearer us, but Mum insisted on driving there. We used to go early in the morning, before the start of work and school, and when we arrived we were confronted by mountains of clothes, together with housewives and servants from the neighbourhood. We looked for bargains in the piles of underwear, skirts and quilted jackets of poor quality. If you found something you liked you pulled hard on the item of clothing, looking out of the corner of your eye at other people tugging at the same thing. Pitched battles could be waged in silence over beige knickers and nude bras at the market in Poblenou. When we drove home afterwards in Mum’s car, we sometimes stopped to fill up at the neighbourhood petrol station. Mum never filled up more than the reserve tank. I think that said something about our lives, because how can you call the reserve tank a reserve when it’s all you have?

Now and then we used to say how we longed to get away from this life and this building. How we were really nomads, not made to live between four walls, not suited to being locked in and having to live out our lives within ninety square metres. When we eventually shared these thoughts with Alba Cambó, she responded that it was true that you had to watch out for buildings because their main task was to maintain the decay going on inside their occupants. It does people good to wander, to be outside breathing clean air, she said. Letting yourself be confined inside walls just fuels the mould growing inside you. That’s right, Mum said. One day maybe we will get out of here, go off somewhere. What are you waiting for? Alba Cambó asked. I don’t know, Mum said. For Araceli’s father to come back maybe. Cambó laughed. Crap! she shouted then. You’re not waiting for any old dad, you’re waiting for Godot like everyone else.

‌

So no Dad, not that I’ve lacked for stand-ins. Only my fathers have all been mayfly dads, the kind that are here one day and gone after three days at most. Some left traces behind, a khaki-coloured toothbrush in the bathroom, an inhaler, a book on a bedside table, and sometimes those traces would give rise to hopes that they might come back, come in the door to the flat and suddenly be struck by the idea that this really was a bit like returning home, that everything was already here — a home, a wife and a child — all they had to do was enter and start living. I wrote about all of them in my diary, and because their names eventually started to blur (Valerio, Enrique, Álvaro, José María) I began calling them ‘the Jogging Pants Man’, ‘the Chuckling Man’ and ‘the Tartare Man’ instead, and then their images would immediately reappear before me.

‘The Tartare Man’ once made himself a steak tartare on our terrace. I had no idea what steak tartare actually was until he explained with a lofty expression on his face that this was what sophisticated bohemians in Paris ate. The sophisticated inhabitants of Paris were people whose taste buds had not yet been destroyed by charred meat and fried onions. He took the ingredients out of the bag and put the tartare together in front of us. The tartare consisted of cutting up a packet of raw mince and mixing it right there and then with egg yolk, salt and pepper. Have a taste — it’s delicious, he said and offered the greasy plastic tray to Mum. She turned her head away and pretended not to look, but I did. His fingers closed hungrily around the mess and you could see the pleasure in his face as he pushed the morsel into his mouth. Uhhnn, he said. Then he swallowed and it was impossible not to think of a snake as his Adam’s apple pushed the mouthful down his throat. Please don’t let her let him move in, I thought, and she didn’t.

For his part ‘the Canary Man’ made his mark with a rather distinctive present. Before he arrived Mum explained that this man was wasn’t ugly, or attractive, but attractively ugly. He turned up one Friday evening, appearing in the gloom of our hall with a bottle he presented to Mum. Mum accepted the gift and put it on the linen cupboard.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

I knew what Mum did with the presents she was given by her male friends. She stuffed them in a box she kept under the bed, and when that was full, she shoved them in the wardrobe. Sometimes she would get bottles of wine and sometimes a bouquet of flowers. She also received chocolates, underwear and spirits and even though she always thanked them politely, it all ended up in the wardrobe in the bedroom. Once the man had gone, she would say that that wardrobe could serve as a storehouse in case of war or hard times. I used to think that a storehouse for hard times ought to contain completely different things like rice, beans and raincoats. Not Bowmore, corsets and Valrhona. But the Canary Man was to surprise us, because once he had handed over the wine bottle he said he had brought something else as well. He took a step backwards, and reached for something on the landing.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is for you.’

He handed the cage proudly to Mum. An orange canary perched on a stick inside, its head aslant, looking at us with its black pinhead eyes. For a moment Mum just stood there staring at the bird as though she had been turned to stone. Then she laughed, said thank you and carried the cage, which had a little hook on the top, through the hall and put it on the cupboard beside the toilet door. I followed behind, looking at it. The bird looked back at me.

‘Do you like it?’ the man said when he had taken off his jacket and Mum had gone into the kitchen to get something to drink.

I shook my head.

‘I don’t like birds.’

‘So what do you like?’ the man asked.

‘Ice cream,’ I replied.

He laughed.

‘Then I’ll have to remember that for next time. Ice cream. I really won’t forget. Ice cream.’

The canary stayed silent throughout the evening. It perched timidly on its stick, pressed against the bars at the far end of the cage and its eyes remained jet black. Finally it fell asleep and then it looked dead, although its claws still managed to clutch its stick.

‘That’s the way it sleeps,’ said Mum’s friend.

‘What if it falls off?’ I asked.

‘They never fall off.’

And the canary didn’t fall off its perch. The next morning it woke us with its chirping, which penetrated into every corner of the flat. It must have been no later than five o’clock when it started, and once the clock struck seven, Mum got up and put a cloth over the cage, but the bird continued to chirp. At nine Mum and the Canary Man came out of the bedroom and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. They ate in silence and the Canary Man was now more ugly than attractive. I drew a canary on a notepad that lay on the table and that Mum used for writing down what she needed to buy at the shops. The bird was orange and flying towards a blue sky. Mum and the Canary Man both glanced furtively at the drawing although no one said anything. Finally Mum finished her coffee, put the cup on the draining board and went into the hall. She took the cage by the hook and moved into the bedroom. The Canary Man and I followed her. The Canary Man had a croissant in his hand and I could hear him chewing while Mum opened the window. When she lifted the cage to the window ledge and opened its door, a little clucking sound seemed to come from the man’s throat. He stopped chewing at that point. The canary moved to the opening of the cage and then jumped onto the window. It stayed there for a good long while, as though considering something. It gave Mum, the Canary Man and me a sidelong look. Finally it launched itself into the air and flew out the window. It dropped rapidly, frantically fluttering its wings; it sank a bit more and then seemed to give up and tumbled through the air like a brightly coloured handkerchief. Finally it hit the ground and just lay there. I could feel the Canary Man’s breath against my neck as we stood staring down at the street. It smelled of croissant, but he had completely stopped chewing.

‘What a feeble birdie that was,’ said Mum and closed the window.

‘You killed it,’ said the man.

‘It fell,’ said Mum.

Nothing more was said about the bird. In fact nothing more was said at all. Mum clattered the cups in the sink instead and then onto the drainer. By eleven the newly showered Canary Man was in the hall and saying his thanks. He said though he had to leave now, maybe they would be in touch again at some point in the future.

‘Of course,’ said Mum.

The Canary Man left and never came back.

After that Mum said:

‘I’m ready for love, just not for lovers and husbands. I can’t cope with them.’

As for me, I had nothing against men, whether they were husbands or lovers. I had also been in love, only once it’s true, but as they say it’s not the number of men who have filed past in your life that counts but the intensity of feelings you experience. Benicio Mercader was a nice man, not the kind who ate raw mince with his hands or turned up carrying a cage. Benicio Mercader was carefree, good-humoured, sharp as a razor blade and virile as a bull (those are not my words in that last bit but a paraphrase made afterwards by Muriel Ruiz). He came strolling along the promenade one day in Perpignan, this was a long time ago now, ten years, probably more. We were staying at the time with Mum’s friend Geraldine who had her own parasol on the beach that summer. As she used to say, it was a ‘prime-place parasol’ that any foreign tourist would have to pay ten euros a day for, but which Geraldine as Geraldine had got for free. Mum had no trouble accepting Geraldine’s diva-like airs, and just laughed and said that if Geraldine was given a parasol in the front row totally for free there could only be one reason — Geraldine’s appearance. Any parasol-vendor with even an ounce of business sense was bound to realise that if you put someone like Geraldine in the front row, all the rows behind would fill up no matter how much you charged. And that was true. Because there are bodies and there are bodies, as Geraldine used to say. Some were like shamefaced shacks that buckled under other people’s eyes as they moved along the shoreline. Those same people, in Geraldine’s view, pretended to themselves that the physical was not important and that what counted was the soul. Then there were those who were born to be paradise on two legs. When they walked by it was as if everything stopped. Those who said it was the soul that mattered gazed in astonishment at these walking paradises, wondering how they could ever have been created, how their proportions could come together in such exquisite and therefore also such appalling harmony. The only answer the shacks could come up with was that if they were that beautiful, they would have to be incredibly defective in some other way.

‘That’s your basic algorithm of envy and pettiness,’ Geraldine maintained. ‘It sticks in their craws when they’re forced to confront the fact that others have been favoured in so many ways at the same time.’

Once she had said this, she allowed herself to sink back into her deck chair and fall asleep with a contented smile on her lips.

A bit further along the beach was the ice-cream parlour owned by a Frenchman called Monsieur Leval. From afar his stand looked like an old shed equipped with faded orange awnings from the post-war period. The walls were made of planks painted brown, but time and salt water had worn away at them so that the whole shed looked pale and bleached by the sun. Although the windows were so clean you could see yourself reflected in them, and that made for a strange contrast. The queue of ice-cream buyers at Monsieur Leval’s was always long, sometimes snaking all the way up the promenade to end in a little hook in front of Señor Javi’s parlour, which was usually all but deserted. Everyone wanted to buy their ice cream at Leval’s and when you saw people eating his ices you realised there had to be something really extraordinary about them. Some people emitted little groans of pleasure, others simply stared at one another as though spellbound and some people just shut their eyes and sat there with the sun in their faces, their entire being dissolving into the ice cream. Unfortunately Geraldine had a score to settle with Monsieur Leval. She always refused to discuss the details but it had something to do with the way Leval had once, a long time ago, placed his parlour in relation to the French windows of Geraldine’s sitting room.

‘He just dumped his shed on the beach like a lump of elephant shit and ruined the first fifty metres of my view,’ she told Mum.

This meant that none of us could buy ice cream from Monsieur Leval. Although Mum reproached Geraldine for falling out with someone who made such delicious ice cream, she continued to insist in my presence that there were any number of ice-cream parlours along the promenade and that we really didn’t need to rub salt into Geraldine’s wounds by choosing the parlour owned by her long-standing enemy. This was why I was the only customer at Señor Javi’s stand for several days that summer and whenever Javi handed me the ice creams, the people in Leval’s queue looked at me as though I was an idiot, or a tourist, someone who had only just arrived and had no inside knowledge at all.

The more they talked about Leval and how forbidden it was to buy ice cream from him, the more irresistible my craving for his ice cream became. After a week on the beach in Perpignan the only thing I could think about was the ice cream at Monsieur Leval’s. I woke up with a peculiar kind of hunger inside me and even though I ate breakfast on Geraldine’s terrace it was like pouring water through a sieve because when I got to the beach I felt just as hungry as when I woke up. I hung around the shed and watched people eating Leval’s ice cream. The children’s faces got all sticky when their tongues splashed into the soft, pastel flavours. One time I went into the parlour. I could feel the chill from the ice cream boxes and the aroma of the freshly baked cones. There was a large bowl of whipped cream on the counter that Madame Leval used as topping. Monsieur Leval looked at me coldly and said that if I wasn’t going to buy anything, I should leave.

The day Mercader turned up I saw myself reflected in the window of Leval’s bar. First you could see the row of mums, dads and kids in the reflection, and standing behind them — as though in a different plane — was me. With my pale and slightly awkward body I was standing outside the image like an extra. I think that was the first time I ever looked at myself properly. Properly and as I really was, I mean. And, as if I had seen something I shouldn’t have seen, or realised something too quickly and too soon, I backed away from the window and then turned round and ran towards Mum and Geraldine under the parasol.

‘You’ve got to give me some money for ice cream now,’ I said.

‘Not if you are going to get it from Monsieur Leval,’ said Geraldine.

I set off towards the ice-cream parlour again. Behind me I heard Geraldine shout that there was no point in my hanging around there if I wasn’t actually going to buy anything. A girl in the queue stuck her tongue out at me. The girl’s mother said that if I was going to buy an ice cream I had to go to the end of the queue.

‘Though she hasn’t got any money, has she,’ said the girl.

It really is hard to imagine any of it turning out differently when you think about the circumstances at that moment. All Candyman had to do was push against an open door. Suddenly there he was, in the picture. In the mirror of the window I saw him walking towards the post-war awnings, the row of kids, and me. I thought there is no chance in the world he walks towards me. No chance in the world that someone like that man would be walking towards me. But it was an odd day, a day when anything could happen. Because he definitely was walking towards me and he had his hands in his pockets, strolling along like a lord with a bored expression on his face, which appeared somewhat amused when he looked at me.

When he was only a few metres behind me, he stopped.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

Our eyes met in the window.

‘What’s yours?’ I replied.

He looked at the sea and laughed.

‘My name is Candyman,’ he said then.

I turned around. He smiled, and he was unshaven. He toyed a bit with his linen shirt, which was buttoned up at the neck.

‘Candyman isn’t a real name,’ I said.

‘It’s a name like any other name,’ he replied. ‘So what’s yours then?’

He took off his glasses and put the top of one side of the frame in his mouth.

‘My name is Candygirl,’ I said.

Candyman laughed and took a step closer. He bent down towards me and whispered in my ear:

‘That’s lucky. Because when Candyman meets Candygirl she is allowed to ask for whatever she wants from him. And he has to give it to her.’

His words were like warm bits of cotton wool in my ear. Over his shoulder I could see the beach and all its inhabitants stretching out. Kilometre upon kilometre of heavenly bodies and shamefaced shacks. Closest to us lay two women with surgically enhanced breasts that stuck straight up.

‘The ice cream in there,’ I said. ‘All the ice cream inside Monsieur Leval’s ice-cream parlour.’

Unlike ordinary men and their bullshit, Candyman didn’t back out. Candyman was a real gentleman who understood what you said right from the start. He didn’t say to Leval: Just give her a large ice cream and that’ll keep her quiet, and he didn’t wink at the other adults in a tacit conspiracy. Instead he took my hand, walked past the whole queue and into the ice-cream parlour. People muttered and someone called out in a muffled sort of way that the last place was at the very back. When we got to the front, he said to Monsieur Leval that he was going to buy all the ice cream in the entire parlour for the little lady at his side. If we could get it loaded onto a cart and driven over to the promenade, he’d be most obliged. At first Leval said it would be quite impossible. All the ice cream — all at one go and for a single customer? His wife came and stood beside him and asked: what would all the other people who were craving ice cream say — and what would she and her husband have to do for the rest of the day?

But objections of this kind posed not the slightest problem for Candyman. He said that surely this was a matter of money like everything else? People glared at us as we left. After a while Leval and his wife turned up on the promenade carrying the boxes. While I opened them Candyman sat on the wall and smoked. He smiled when he saw me eating with a spoon Leval had also provided. I tasted each and every one of the different flavours. Violet, liquorice, strawberry, condensed milk, chocolate. Passersby stared and laughed in disbelief; presumably they had never seen a child eating an ice-cream mountain with a cigar-smoking lord at her side. It was hot, although every now and then there was a breeze off the sea that brought a bit of coolness with it and the smell of salt.

‘Damn, what a great time we could have,’ said Candyman and puffed on his cigar. ‘You and me, Candygirl.’

Before Mum and Geraldine could come running over, I had managed to point out Geraldine’s flat to him, and also told him that I had been without a father for the last few years. Candyman asked what had made Dad pack his rucksack and leave home and I replied I had no idea. Parents are mysterious, he said then, you can’t get a proper handle on them, they slip away from you like eels; they’re not really interested in solving the problems. The problems? I said. Yes, he said. The problems. The really difficult ones. The ones even you can barely bring yourself to talk about. Childhood on the other hand was something we could talk about, he thought. Being a child was difficult, it has to be said, but childhood was far and away the worst thing he had ever experienced. That was why he had repressed it and now he felt like a prince. He really couldn’t remember any of it, when he thought about it. Apart from the fact that his Dad, like mine, was gone. His Mum was as old as the hills and currently in an old people’s home, where she guzzled porridge to the accompaniment of dance band music. Now and then she would shout something into the ears of the other living dead and that was how she passed her time: a kind of countdown towards what would be a far from solemn and tragic exit and more of a customs formality instead, a transit from one world to another. She did not recognise Candyman any more, and when he occasionally brought a present with him, some perfume or a scarf or a necklace, she used to flush it down the toilet as if by reflex.

‘If you’d like, you could come with me to meet my mother some time,’ he said. ‘She likes children just like I do. She cheers up then, she sings and stamps her feet to the beat.’

I laughed at him as he talked, it sounded to me like he had a slight speech defect whenever he said f and s. I also asked what his name was when he wasn’t called Candyman, and he replied that then he was called Benicio. When he asked me the same question, I said my name was Araceli. Benicio thought that Araceli was a lovely name. That it went very well with Benicio. Benicio and Araceli. Araceli and Benicio. I laughed and Candyman said I had a lovely laugh. Then he said that he had been looking for tenderness all his life and he believed that that was what everyone was doing, deep down.

‘Me too?’ I asked.

‘Maybe not right now,’ he said. ‘But it’s bound to come.’

After a while the ice cream started to melt and trickled across the paving stones and onto the sand below. A dog walked past and got ice cream on its paws, and afterwards you could see the tracks disappearing into the distance behind the dog. Then we heard someone calling my name. When we looked up Mum and Geraldine were running across the sand, brandishing towels and hats in the air.

‘That’s my signal to go now,’ said Candyman.

He got up off the wall and smoothed out the creases that had formed in his trousers.

‘But if you want more ice cream another day we could meet here,’ he said.

‘What day and what time?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry — if you’re here I’ll find you, Candygirl.’

‘Candyman,’ I mumbled, and his name tasted of violets.

The next day a package arrived at Geraldine’s flat, written on it was For Araceli. The package contained a pair of glossy red shoes. It’s that bloody paedophile, said Geraldine when I opened the box. I’ll take care of those, said Mum and snatched them from my hands. Only Mum has never been good at hiding-places. She hid them at the very top of the hall cupboard, and it was child’s play to clamber up a stepladder inside Geraldine’s cupboard and take the shoes out of the box and then put them back without disturbing anything. I ran down to the promenade in my trainers, but changed them as soon as I was out of sight of the house and then tottered down towards the shoreline.

I waited a long time for him. People stared, laughing and pointing. I would stand there like that for several mornings and was almost about to give up when I suddenly saw him come strolling along again. He was walking exactly the way he did the first time I saw him, and I felt a pang. There’s the man I love, I thought. At his side was a woman in a white linen dress. They stopped when they saw me and the woman smiled warmly. I thought she must be his sister.

‘We were going to see each other again some day,’ I said.

The woman’s phone rang and she continued on her way while talking into it.

‘You look really lovely in your shoes,’ said Benicio, ‘but unfortunately I am too old for you.’

‘Love has nothing to do with age,’ I said.

‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But only swine go to extremes.’

He pulled his hand through his hair.

‘You know my name,’ he said then. ‘If you still remember me in ten, twenty years’ time, you can look me up then. I promise I’ll try and …’

He tried to find the right words.

‘ … be someone for you.’

He started walking towards the woman in white.

‘But what about me?’ I called.

‘You’ll be fine, never fear,’ he replied.

I have often thought afterwards that I should try to find Benicio Mercader. After all he did say, Look me up, if you still remember me in ten years’ time. Ten years have passed, and I still remember him. Whenever I meet a man, I always compare him with Benicio Mercader. I know this is idiotic because what do I actually know about Benicio Mercader?

But I think about him, and I dream about him, sometimes I can even see him before me when I come home and the flat is empty. He’s in the kitchen, and he’s still wearing the linen shirt and has sunglasses on. He pours some chilled white wine into a glass and takes my bag and puts it on a chair and he asks me about my day as he hands me the glass. He puts his cheek against mine and he still smells of salt water like that day by the sea. Then we sit down and he takes my shoes off and sits for a while with the soles of my feet in his hands. And then he says, Let’s go out now. And we go out into the night, out into Benicio Mercader’s night of adventure, and we keep holding hands the whole time and he is the person I want him to be, and I am the person he wants me to be. I am not worried about having to play a role because I know how. I have been playing a role all my life and whenever I have stopped, I have always started again. Benicio knows this and it doesn’t bother him. Neither he nor I think there is anything odd about it; after all we are always playing roles. Then we walk around Barcelona and everything is warm and funny and enveloping.

And that is, of course, why I do not look him up. Because just imagine if I did look him up, rang the bell on his door, and then he opened it and was a sick old lover with a sick old linen-wearing wife, and maybe he would grasp my wrist and whisper: At last, Araceli, at last. I’ve longed for you so, I’ve needed you so. No thanks, I would be forced to say, backing away. That sort of intimacy isn’t for me, goodbye.

In reality it all ended on the promenade in Perpignan. Benicio Mercader strolled away with the linen-wearing woman at his side. I remained standing there in the red shoes and would never see him again.

‌

A month or two after she and Blosom moved into the flat below us Alba Cambó went to Italy. To Genoa for a change of air, she said to Mum when they met by the post boxes in the entrance. The home of pesto, she said as well. Incredibly beautiful rocks and sea, air you can actually breathe and language that is like a bubble bath of pearls. She was going to travel around, eat well and write whatever occurred to her, little short stories she would then try to sell to Semejanzas. Oh yes? we said. That sounds nice. We saw her leave home one morning; she crossed the street and stood there waiting for the bus to Pla Catalunya and the airport coach. She had a kerchief tied around her head and wore large sunglasses that covered almost her entire face. I thought she was looking at her own terrace with a certain superiority as though she was saying here I am and now I am off and who knows what I will get up to and who knows if I will even come back and, if I do come back, who knows with whom. The inherent mystery, the upper hand, of the traveller over those who remained behind and had to watch as she got on the bus, which went up the hill and turned round the corner.

For two weeks there was total silence from the flat below. There was no sign of Blosom either. And then one morning there they were again, Alba and Blosom on the terrace, only this time they were not alone. There was a third person present. I remember it was a Tuesday, because Mum and I had been at the market in Poblenou and bought clothes. We had our bargains packed in the yellow plastic bags we were carrying. Once we had parked the car and were walking towards the flat, we could see immediately that there was something different about Cambó’s terrace. The old plants had been swapped for new ones. Now there were lemon and olive trees on it. An abundant bougainvillea was hanging over the wall to the neighbouring building. Alba was sitting at the table. Good Lord, Mum mumbled. What now? She must have gone completely mad over in Italy. Because a man was sitting next to Alba. A real bullfighter, a turkey, a rooster, Mum said under her breath as we approached them. Alba and the man came over to say hello. They stood there, all attentive politeness, on the other side of the fence; they each held a glass of wine and were both obviously drunk. Blosom stayed sitting at the table and raised her glass to us. Cambó and the man told us about the holiday when they had got to know one another, about the beach outside Genoa, and about San Remo and other places they had made trips to. They asked where we had been and Mum said that we had been at the market in Poblenou to buy clothes. Alba smiled the whole time and told us that we might be getting a new neighbour, Valentino Coraggioso, the very man standing beside her. They laughed together. How beautiful they are, I thought. Mum asked Valentino what his job was. I’m a porn star, Valentino replied. Oh yes? we said. Alba giggled. Did you really have to tell my neighbours that? she said. I’m just joking, Valentino said then. Mum and I didn’t know what to say, we just stood there holding our bags, and then he laughed and Alba Cambó laughed even harder, and we had no idea what they were laughing at, whether it was at something they had said, or if it was just a way of making fun of something or if they were laughing at us. Nice to meet you in any case, said Mum. We’d better go in and hang up our clothes. Come on Araceli. Don’t take it seriously, Mariela! Alba called. Valentino could never be a porn star, he’s much too ugly. You should have seen the way the fish kept staring at him when he was snorkelling! Mum did not reply, just shook her head as we walked up the stairs. They were royally drunk, the pair of them, she said when we closed the door behind us. It’s on occasions like this I feel deeply and profoundly grateful not to have a man of my own.

Then she said that she had always thought highly of Alba Cambó, and that she had always managed to be straightforward and unpretentious on the surface at least, ‘so perfectly normal’, and this new hilarity felt wrong to her, it didn’t fit in, not in this neighbourhood.

How to describe Valentino Coraggioso? You could describe him the way Mum did the Canary Man: attractively ugly, though with a certain inclination to the lymphatic. A suitable husband for Alba? That was impossible to tell, because we didn’t know him or Alba. We had no idea what lay in their past, or what the future held in store. We had only seen them standing there with the sun shining on them, surrounded by the flowers that had been newly watered.

It would not be long, however, before I had an opportunity to get to know Valentino. His place of work was not far from my school, so it seemed entirely natural for me to get a lift with him in his car every morning. He kept talking, which he would never do in Alba’s company; his voice was different and he took liberties in asking questions he would never have asked if Alba or Blosom had been present. Have you got a boyfriend? he asked. In the beginning he would ask this every day: Have you got a boyfriend, someone you’ve just got to have, you’re quite the grown-up lady after all? I didn’t answer and just kept looking out the window. When I failed to reply, he would eventually give up and start talking about himself. He sounded anecdotal when he did this, as though he thought his life was a string of pearls, each one a successful episode about himself, a photo album you could leaf through in as much time as it took to drive between Joaquín Costa and Parque Güell. Valentino Coraggioso as a child with his mother in the park in Genoa. Valentino Coraggioso fishing with his father and how the two of them, Mum and Dad Coraggioso, stayed together all their lives, how they understood that it was all about staying together, that that was what everything was all about. He remembered them as the last happy couple. Something happened after them. Everyone started thinking of themselves. Tender egos were allowed to grow uncontrolled, to overflow every bank. The glue between the sexes split and most people became unhappy.

I laughed in an attempt to defuse the issue. You’ve got to have at least one bad memory from childhood. No one’s got only good memories of growing up. And if someone does have only good ones that’s because they are lying to themselves which means they are still in a state of denial, and that suggests real repressed traumas.

He thought about that.

‘No,’ he said then. ‘There really are people who haven’t got any traumas, even if it’s hard for other people to believe that.’

He continued driving that gigolo car of his with a grim look on his face.

One time he asked me:

‘Don’t you want to find love?’

I replied that I did want to find love, but that I couldn’t cope with husbands and lovers.

‘Husbands and lovers?’ Valentino shouted then. ‘Husbands and lovers! What do you know about them, Araceli Villalobos?’

Come to think of it, what did I know about husbands and lovers, and what did Valentino Coraggioso know about Alba Cambó? You never really know anything about anything. At best you have an aching feeling in your stomach and a compass that sometimes points right, and other times spins crazily. And what did we know about Blosom? Blosom whom we thought had crossed the Atlantic to do Alba Cambó’s washing-up. Mum and I had not the faintest idea of whatever plans Blosom might have, and to what extent we might be part of them. What we felt towards her was that pleasant and proper sympathy people who are safely removed from problems can permit themselves to feel. We would stand at the railing and look sympathetically down at Alba’s terrace where Blosom was moving around. We had no way of knowing that while we were looking at Blosom, Blosom was looking at us out of the corner of her eye, the mother and daughter in the flat above: women who were not yet overcrowded, needy perhaps, and still hadn’t let a man move in. I can see it all before me now, looking back, and it makes the whole thing slightly comical. I realise she must have had intentions of some kind even then — because there came a knock on the door one Saturday morning just a few months after Coraggioso’s arrival. The three of them stood there in a row: Alba Cambó, Valentino Coraggioso and Blosom. Alba Cambó had lost a little weight and looked pale and sickly, her hair was all flat and dry. Coraggioso was smiling wryly with the whole of his face and his hair had been slicked down with water.

‘Hello, Araceli,’ said Alba. ‘How are you?’

Without waiting for a reply, she went on:

‘Please excuse us for turning up so early on a Saturday morning. Is Mariela home?’

I let them into the hall. Valentino held out a bag of croissants. I invited them to sit in the living room. The flat was silent and the air musty. What light there was came in through the blinds. Blosom went over to the terrace doors and opened them.

‘Ah,’ said Valentino as the smell of the sea and exhaust fumes filled the living room.

I went out into the kitchen to make coffee. I put the cups on a tray, together with the sugar bowl. When I returned, the rituals of greeting and the apologies appeared to have been completed and Alba had got to the point.

‘It’s about Blosom,’ she said and took the coffee cup I passed to her in both hands.

Mum looked uncomprehending.

‘Blosom?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

Alba bit into a croissant and chewed slowly.

‘As you know I’ve met Valentino here. And he’s going to move in permanently. We’ve been trying it out for several weeks now, and we’ve decided that we want to be together for good.’

Alba smiled at Mum while she took Valentino’s hand. Valentino also smiled at Mum.

‘I see,’ said Mum and squirmed in her chair. ‘That sounds nice. Congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ Alba Cambó replied.

‘And?’ Mum said then.

‘And,’ said Alba, ‘that’s where you come in.’

‘How’s that?’

‘You see, I can’t keep Blosom on now that a man is moving in.’

Mum looked confused.

‘And you want me to …?’

‘That’s it,’ said Alba nodding. ‘That’s it, Mariela. I would be eternally grateful.’

‘Only I … ’ Mum began, but Alba interrupted her.

‘We’ve talked about it a great deal, Blosom and I. We’ve been over it back and forth. We’ve gone over a lot of old wounds and tried to come up with a good solution. And the only solution that we can see is you.’

For a short while there was absolute silence. Mum looked at Alba, and Alba looked at Mum with a stubborn smile. Blosom stared out through the terrace doors. Valentino Coraggioso sat perched on the edge of the chair Blosom had pulled out for him, his legs crossed and his eyes fixed on the floor. Outside on the street a lorry could be heard driving past, and then a rubbish container being slammed shut.

‘Only, you see,’ said Mum and cleared her throat, ‘I don’t need anyone here to help me.’

Blosom looked around the room with an expression of command.

‘I don’t think an extra pair of hands would do any harm, Mariela,’ she said and her tone suggested she and Mum had known one another for ages. ‘There’s one or two things here that could definitely do with a bit of looking after. Including you.’

‘What?’ said Mum.

‘You need someone to take care of you,’ Blosom replied.

‘What do you know about what I need?’ Mum asked.

‘Don’t take it as an insult,’ said Blosom calmly and started looking at her nails.

Mum shook her head.

‘But why did you pick me in particular,’ she said and spread her arms. ‘There are lots of women who are in a better financial position and can afford that level of everyday luxury. But I … I’ve got neither the money nor the room. In any case there are men coming and going here as well. I’ve got a lot of male friends and I like having men around me.’

‘So we’ve noticed,’ said Alba, nodding with her eyebrows raised. ‘But your men don’t live here.’

‘No,’ Mum admitted. ‘They don’t.’

‘Where is the girl’s father?’ asked Blosom.

‘Gone,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve no idea where he is. One day he was just gone and … I’ve no idea.’

‘I am so sorry,’ Blosom said. ‘I really am.’

Only, despite both expressions of sorrow, there was a note of expectation in her voice.

‘And besides,’ said Alba, ‘Blosom says you already know each other pretty well.’

‘I’m not really sure I know what you’re talking about?’ said Mum.

Blosom cleared her throat and looked straight at Mum with resolve.

‘What about all those evenings, Mariela? All the evenings we spent out on the terrace, you and me, you on your terrace, me on mine. All the silences we’ve recently shared. We may even have shared each other’s thoughts. Doesn’t that count for something?’

Mum stared at Blosom and I could see a blush spread across her cheeks. Valentino Coraggioso nodded thoughtfully, as though he understood exactly what Blosom was getting at.

‘May I speak to Mariela in private?’ Blosom said.

‘Of course,’ said Alba. ‘This is between the two of you now.’

Mum sat there in bewilderment as Valentino and Alba got up, put the chairs back at the table and then went into the hall. Then Blosom got up as well, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that she should now be the one to show the guests out. She shut the door behind them and settled down on her chair again.

‘I wouldn’t have come here unless it was absolutely necessary,’ she began. ‘I’m very fond of Alba, she has saved me from quite a few difficult situations and we share a past now, so to speak. But ever since she met Coraggioso it’s as if she’s become another person. And while I’m sure you don’t need me to go into the details, let me just tell you what I witnessed yesterday afternoon when I got home from the market. I don’t think they heard me come in, and after I’d unpacked all the shopping in the kitchen, I went into the living room to find out if they wanted a cup of coffee. And the sight that met my eyes then, Mariela, was an intimate moment that involved Alba lying across the sofa and Valentino lying on top of her. All of his attention was focused on an egg that lay across her buttocks. A little later they called out to me, and I went in. Yes? I said. We’ve had a bit of an accident, said Coraggioso. An egg got broken on the sofa. Could you clean it up? What was I supposed to do? I went and got the bucket and started cleaning up the egg and the bodily fluids that were mixed in with it. Alba and Coraggioso just sat there in the other armchair giggling all the while. They giggled like a couple of teenagers, and while I’ve got nothing against having a good time, I couldn’t stand that giggling, Mariela. I need somewhere to go. I can’t stay in their love nest. They can do whatever they like, it’s no skin off my nose, but I just don’t want to be involved in wiping up any more eggs. I’ve cleaned enough toilets in my day and there’s something that happens to you when you’re on your knees dealing with other people’s bodily fluids. There’s this twig that snaps, you can hear it clear as a bell.’

‘But I don’t know you,’ Mum protested. ‘I don’t know anything about you, you just knock on my door and want to move in and I …’

‘Have you got a moment to spare?’ said Blosom. ‘You don’t know me, for the simple reason that we’ve never had any kind of serious conversation.’

Blosom did not wait for Mum’s answer but turned to me.

‘Araceli, could you get us another pot of coffee, and some hot milk.’

While I went into the kitchen, I could hear her sighing deeply. Then she began her story.

‌

‘I left Livingston because that town was a godforsaken hole stuck between the swamps and hell. I lived in a tiny shed on the beach, and it always smelled of greasy fried chicken and swampy air where I lived. The gringos used to drive around in boats staring at the beach and at us poor blacks. People did their business just about anywhere. Sometimes turds would float by on the water, and sometimes there would be other things, worse things, like red liquids and empty bottles with poison symbols on them. At our backs we had the jungle and in front lay the sea and to our right, if we faced the sea, was the Río Dulce. Salt water from the ocean forced its way up the riv‌er and with it came sharks and other sea creatures. There were crocodiles and snakes in the fresh water of the river. But even if the big animals always seem to be the ones that terrify you most, the real horror was the dirt. And that was the delta I grew up in: a kind of no man’s land where two worlds came together, a saltwater world and a freshwater one, in a deep and impenetrable filth. The air used to throb with insects after the rainy season. The mangrove swamp skirting the sea gurgled softly. You could see pelicans watching and waiting on floating logs, and the tourists from North America took pictures of those birds, they thought they were exotic, only I could never help thinking that if I fell into the water one day and died it would be those beaks skewering me. Carrion-eaters and scavengers, birds and rats are just the same, and poverty was forcing us closer and closer to them, inch by inch, day by day. So when the chance came to get out, I didn’t hesitate for a second. I am going with you, I said, I’m coming too, and so I went home and packed a bag and then I stepped aboard the boat that would take us up the river to the Banana Palms hotel, where the laundry van was waiting to drive us to Guatemala City.

At Banana Palms we caught glimpses of the bodies lying in the sun, the staff with trays of fruit and a very overweight man who was carried away by helicopter from the hotel’s private landing pad. I have never seen luxury like I saw at Banana Palms. Then again that luxury was nothing compared with what you could see on the Camino Real and that was nothing in turn against the kind of luxury that exists in places I will never get to see. We were flown to Mexico from Guatemala City, to a town on the US border. From there we would have to make our own way.

There was a factory in the border town where thousands of women and men worked. I stood at a conveyor belt sealing tins. I went back to my home every night. I lived in a shed that was pretty much like the one I had lived in in Livingston, only this one was better. I had running water, for instance, and some other stuff that made it feel like there were options here at least, and that things could change, that you weren’t stuck for good in a brackish nightmare along with anacondas and turds. You were close to a border and one day, just like that, you might cross it; a feature of a borderland is that it only takes a few manoeuvres to get from one side to the other. And that gave you a sense that anything could happen. Perhaps that was why I met the man I did, because I trusted in the feeling that everything would turn out all right. Let’s call him the Mexican worker. He used to read to me before I fell asleep. That is what I remember most about him: his voice while he was reading to me before I fell asleep. He always read the same book but I can’t remember what it was called. He said that book was a curse, everything was a curse, the whole of Mexico was a curse, but he liked the curse the way you imagine a bacteria likes the wound it lives in. Those were his very words:

“I love this curse called Mexico the same way a sick microbe loves the infected wound it can grow and thrive in.”

I said I thought that sounded grotesque. He said that life was like that, that was exactly what it was like; grotesque was the right word, a very good word, a very useful word. And then he continued reading the book, slow and drawling as though he was falling asleep while he read, although he never did. He always read to the end. You would have to call that real consideration, ensuring you had fallen asleep first, wouldn’t you? And not to stop reading before he could hear your breathing change and knew you were somewhere else, and then he would reach over and turn out the light, and then he would fall asleep too, and the bed would become a boat that embraced two people who really loved one another. You mustn’t think that love is something that doesn’t exist, Mariela, because it does. You live alone, and you may have lost faith and I have too sometimes, but then I think about the Mexican worker and I believe again with the whole of my being. I wish I had managed to save the book he used to read. I don’t even remember what it was about any more.

We were happy in that cabin on the border. Every day we got up, washed ourselves in running water, drank a cup of hot black coffee the Mexican worker brewed on the stove. Then we walked to the factory. We worked all day. And all day as we stood at our stations and sweated and the factory kept pounding away like a truck engine all around us, we were thinking about each other’s bodies. In any case the first thing we did when we got home to our flat (we called it a flat even thought it was a hut; that was a means of surviving, I think, calling things by different names than were rightly theirs), the first thing we did was to take all our clothes off and go straight to bed. I don’t think I have ever been with anyone else in that way in my entire life, not like I was with the Mexican worker in the hut we shared on the border. Lorries with raw materials for the factories drove past on the road outside. We barely heard them. The heat was oppressive and we sweated like the damned, but when you are together with someone the way we were together in that place, everything becomes meaningful and you no longer have to keep looking or thinking.

So we were happy almost all the time, apart from the odd night when I woke up thinking it felt as if we were lying in a grave or on the bottom of the sea. Those unimaginable nights. Everything was quiet, the trucks had stopped running and the Mexican worker’s breathing had become so slow it sometimes felt as if several minutes went by between each breath. I lay there listening and kept waiting for the next breath to come. I was thinking about what I would do if he died, because there were a lot of deaths in places like that, people died all the time and not just women but men as well. They died like flies, and even if they weren’t raped or maimed, they got crushed in a press or sawn apart by an automated machine and they were rarely talked about because many of them had no relatives; it was as if they had sprung fully formed from the soil, born to be ghosts, because that soil was so dry nothing could grow out of it. If the Mexican worker died, I would never love anyone again. Like a hunger-striker protesting against God, I would deny pleasure any access to my body. I would be content with keeping my surroundings clean and that was all, I wouldn’t have sex and I wouldn’t eat good food. I had time to think all of that as I was lying there in the darkness just waiting for his next breath to come. In the end it did and then I began waiting for the next one.

Looking back I realise that those nights were a kind of practising for being dead, a sort of dress rehearsal if you like. I lay there twisting in the sheets until they were soaked through and wrinkled, giving off a sensation of bodies and dirt. I would leave the shed then and go and stand outside, and on some nights the whole sky was covered in stars and you could hear the cicadas playing even though it was so cold. I could be standing there, looking upwards, and still have the feeling inside me that I was at the bottom of the sea. I used to stand there smoking my fag with a sore groin and the Mexican worker’s bodily fluids running together with my own down the inside of my thigh. Then I would go back in and lie beside him again. Sometimes I lay awake until dawn, and then all I could do was get up, drink coffee and walk to the factory.

And that was how our lives carried on until I became pregnant.

The child was born, and everything seemed to be fine. We formed a little family. We formed a little family on the border, three people on the borderland. But as we were both working in the daytime, we had no idea what to do with the child. There were women who tied their children to the table at home. Who left food out and came back ten hours later. That wasn’t something we would ever have done. There was a nursery we left him at every morning even though it cost us a pretty large part of the miserable wages we earned. We knew he would meet other children there and that he was safe. Whatever precautions you take though, danger always comes at you from the direction you aren’t looking in, that’s just the way things are and it doesn’t make any difference that you have understood that and started taking different precautions, because the danger will always come at you from your blind spot no matter what you do. And after a few years that terrible morning dawned. I was getting ready and was about to leave, I just had to put my lipstick on in front of the mirror in ‘the hall’. It wasn’t something I normally did, because no one would care at the factory, only that morning I just felt I wanted to be cheerful, and have brightly coloured lips. I thought: Maybe this will be a better day if I put on a bit of colour. I carefully sketched out the outlines with the lip pencil, highlighted my cupid’s bow a bit more firmly and then filled it all in with the lip brush I had dipped in the glossy lipstick. And it was just as I was putting the cap on the lipstick and inspecting my now-painted lips in the mirror in front of me that I heard the brakes screech. I looked out the window and saw something flying through the air. I couldn’t work out if it was a bucket or a spade or a shoe but while I was looking at the object fly through the air it was as if everything came to a stop inside me, as though all my organs ceased to function and just let go and dropped through my body. The child made no sound. You couldn’t even hear the thud over the sound of engines. I rushed out and the truck driver was standing there by the road in his three-day stubble, completely bewildered. The engine of the truck was running behind him, like a great beast from one of those films set in the deserts of the American Southwest. I’ve got no idea what happened, he shouted through the din. The kid just suddenly ran out. We started searching but he was nowhere to be found. Don’t call the police, the man who had run over our child shouted. You’ll just screw things up for me if you call the police. I’ll lose everything if you do. I’ve got three kids and a wife. If I lose my job, I’ll lose the whole lot. I didn’t mean to hurt your kid. Maybe he is here somewhere. Playing in the grass, maybe he got scared of this monstrosity. He laughed desperately and touched my shoulder. I called my son’s name again. I wandered through the grass scared out of my wits. The truck driver got out his wallet and gave me three hundred dollars. You’d better not say anything, he said. I’ve got to get going. I can’t risk getting the sack. You’d better not say anything or I’ll come back and kill you. I hope you find your little boy. Goodbye.

He scrambled up into the cabin and put the truck into gear. I stood there by the side of the road listening to the sound fade away. There was complete silence after that. I walked back over to the ditch. My son’s lifeless body was lying thirty metres away. Blood was coming out of his mouth and his eyes were open, looking straight up at the sky, which was covered in cloud that day. I stood there and stared at him. Somewhere inside me I was falling like a gigantic glass ball, at ten thousand kilometres a second, to land on an asphalt road. The bits of glass whirled up around me; I was standing in a kind of rain. Blosom! I heard the Mexican worker call from our place. I turned round. Freshly shaved, he was standing there on the other side of the road with his jacket in his hand and a smile on his face. Where’s that little pixie? he said. We’ve got to go now. I couldn’t say anything. Blosom? he said and came closer. Where’s that little dumpling? he said again, and this time there was something in his voice, something scared or maybe already terrified. He came closer, and I knew that it was all over.

We could never find our way back to what we had had. We died there, in that village by the border. We died slowly and we held on to one another like two people in a wreck at sea. Like two dead plants clinging to each other’s stalks or trunks, we tried to feel that there was something remaining inside us, some fluid or a sap that could still flow and pulse and give us life. But there wasn’t anything like that any more. One time the Mexican worker took me by the head; he grabbed my hair and pulled. I screamed. And then he whispered in my ear, asking if I remembered that our son had been run over while I was putting on my make-up in front of the mirror. Do you remember that, he hissed in my ear, that our son died because you were painting your lips? I forgave him immediately. It wasn’t him speaking; it was the corpses inside us speaking. The corpses, the bones and the stones.

Now that I was dead, I packed together the things I owned, took the three hundred dollars I got from the truck driver and made my way to Europe to find a new life.

I ended up in Madrid with a family made up of a man and a woman. They called themselves a family even though they didn’t have children, and I had nothing against them doing that, only you are not a family unless there are children. I had sex with this man as well, but it was as joyless on his part as it was on mine. That’s how it is if you insist on sexual intercourse when you are dead. Compulsive and mechanical, your standard master and slave relationship, just to confirm who is who and who wears the trousers and has the power. I often used to think that it wasn’t actually us who wanted to do it, not me and not really him either. But his wife’s suspicions were so obvious, they sort of isolated us. She made us feel we had already done what she was picturing in her mind and that kick-started our imaginations, and there is always something tempting about what you imagine and so we might just as well anyway. I can’t explain it in any other way than that it was a result of the mechanical nature of things, ideas and actions. Not that you realise it, but that mechanicalness is at work and you do the kind of inconceivable things that just drag you further and further down, as though what you were really thinking was let’s get it over with because it’s all going to rot and ruin anyway.

The husband had a cat he adored. Her name was Marilyn and, as he himself said, she was the only person he really loved. He didn’t love me and he didn’t love Jessica, his wife. He didn’t love his mother and he didn’t love nature, even though he very much wanted to be the kind of person who loves nature, who can find peace, who can nurture hope for themselves, who can just sit outside and be present. The kind of person who doesn’t need things and doesn’t spend the weekend at shopping malls. He had come to realise that there was something he couldn’t buy, because money couldn’t buy that peace of mind. His cat was the only thing he loved; it was as simple as that. And even though I had nothing against that cat, it would be me who killed it. It sounds strange when you say it: even though I had nothing against that cat, it would be me who killed it. But I didn’t know this when I started working there. Then I thought the cat and I had an understanding, that there was something honest about animals and that the real animals were people.

I got pregnant by this man as well. I didn’t feel able to tell him. I just couldn’t bring myself to say: I’m carrying your child, look after me. And he was just as blind as any other man. He didn’t notice how pale I was, my swollen breasts, that I was getting bigger and smelled differently. But his wife did, of course she did, women don’t suffer from that kind of blindness. Her own childless state made her hate me, carrying her husband’s child in my womb as I was. She could have killed me with all her piles of ironing and the skirting boards she had me clean. Blosom, don’t forget the skirting board behind the sofa. She liked me to fetch her drinks while she was in the bath and she had me massage her shoulders.

“Blosom! The martini!”

And one of those days, one of the last with the two of them, it was hot and the air was throbbing with spores and humidity. I was in the second month and the nausea used to hit me in waves. I got the ice out of the tray, put a cube on my tongue and it slowly dissolved as I went upstairs with the martini for Jessica. I went up to the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the bath and massaged her shoulders.

“Did you forget the bath salts?” she asked.

I got up and got the bath salts from the bathroom cabinet. I poured them into the water, swirling it with my hand.

“This city is bursting with people,” she said. “We ought to move somewhere else. To the country. Living like this is madness. What do you think, Blosom?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking what nice problems they had.

She changed the subject.

“Have you noticed how sweet he is with that little cat of his?”

“He looks after her,” I said. “The way you’re supposed to look after pets.”

“He’s like a father to her,” Jessica said. “He’s developed paternal feelings for her. I think that’s lovely. That’s so sensual, isn’t it? I mean when a man like him develops paternal feelings?”

“You should have given him a child, Señora Jessica,” I replied. “So he wouldn’t have to go and develop paternal feelings for a cat.”

The nausea surged inside me like a wave as I said that, and for a moment I thought I would vomit into the cool, perfumed water.

“You pretentious little ignorant cow,” Jessica cried. “Is that what got drilled into you while you were growing up, that there’s nothing more important than giving a man a child? Hah. Along with all those Venezuelan soaps you watch. That’s soft porn for old ladies, all of them thinking the best thing you can do for a man is to give him a child and then the women are left with chains around the ankles and a ring through the nose, stuck with life in a cage. Fortunately, Vicente doesn’t belong to the old school. He doesn’t actually want to have children.”

Our eyes met in the mirror on the other side of the bathtub. I hate you, I thought. I hate you so much it’s killing me.

“You’ve got something in your hair,” she said.

“What?”

“It looks like sperm.”

“Well it’s not that.”

“Would you mind washing it off, please.”

I got up, went over to the sink and washed away what was in my hair. Then I went back to the tub and massaged a knot in her shoulder she pointed out to me. Again I thought, how much I hate you, Jessica. And she must have been able to sense that from my fingers in some way because suddenly she said, slowly and without opening her eyes.

“You hate me, Blosom, don’t you?”

I stopped short and my hands dropped onto the edge of the tub. What was I supposed to say? My son was run over by a truck. Or: I used to love the Mexican worker. Or: I am going to have a new child. But I didn’t say any of it. Instead I said: “Yes.”

Jessica smiled, still without opening her eyes.

“I can feel it in your hands. They’re stiff as a board when they touch me.”

I squeezed a dab of cream out of a tube lying on the edge of the bath. I oiled my hands and could see her watching me in the mirror.

“You ought to work on forgiveness, Blosom. Not so much for our sakes, but for yours. Carrying around that much bitterness is a terrible burden. Being bitter makes you ugly. You get wrinkles, stomach ache, high blood pressure and everything that goes along with it.”

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to forgive in that case,” I said.

“You could begin by forgiving me because I am who I am.”

I laughed.

“That sounds absurd.”

“No more absurd than the fact that you actually hate me for being who I am.”

We sat in silence for a while and she drained her glass and handed it to me, her eyes closed once more.

“You’re carrying his child, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“That isn’t going to change anything,” she said.

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Perhaps something really will change.”

“He’s no one without me,” Jessica said and opened her eyes. “And he’d rather be someone than just a father. Besides he would never love your child. All he loves is Marilyn, and you know that just as well as I do.”

It was a hot day. We closed all the shutters in the house but the heat got in anyway. This is only spring, I thought. What is it going to be like in summer? A nightmare. Hell on earth. Jessica got out of the bath and lay down in her room with the air conditioning on. Marilyn was lying sprawled across his stomach in the living room. When it cooled down, she was let out to go hunting in the garden. I let her out, and even then I had no idea I would kill her only a day or so later. Here kitty, kitty, I said opening the door. Out you go and hunt some rats. I made a gazpacho in the kitchen. Every now and then I would look into the garden and once I thought I could see Marilyn lying in the shade. I felt sorry for her in the heat. I thought it was cruel to keep a cat in this climate. When the gazpacho was ready, I sat on a chair in the kitchen for a while. The house was filled with a great sense of peace. Everything was quiet, and my nausea had disappeared for a bit. The heat was oppressive and it must have felt like something was about to happen, only I had no idea at that moment anything would. I thought everything had just come to a stop because of the heat and that was all.

A few hours later and I could hear Jessica laughing in the kitchen. I was plumping up the cushions on the sofa, and Vicente was sitting in his armchair watching the sport.

“Come over here,” she called to her husband. “Come and have a look at what your little kitty is getting up to. Ha-ha. Come and have a look.”

He got up, went out into the kitchen and at first he refused to laugh out loud; there was something shocked about the hesitant sounds he was making, as if he didn’t dare laugh at what he was seeing, as if he couldn’t quite let himself do that. Jessica’s laughter on the other hand was all-pervading like a machine gun. “Ra-ta-ta-ta! Your little Marilyn. So your little Marilyn’s not that innocent after all. Ra-ta-ta-ta!”

I went into the kitchen as though in a trance. I saw them there looking out the window, which had been locked shut with the insurance company’s device. A desperate mother blackbird was hovering outside the window. She stopped in mid-air and shrieked. Flapped her wings and shrieked.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Marilyn is eating,” answered the man whose child was in my belly, and there was a lopsided grin on his face.

“Marilyn is eating the blackbird’s chicks,” Jessica shouted. “Ra-ta-ta.”

And I could see her in one of the cypresses; she was gobbling down the contents of the bird’s nest. I can still hear those tiny cries. I can still hear their mother’s desperation ringing in my ears.

“For God’s sake,” I cried. “Get that bastard cat away from them!”

I threw myself at the window but it was secured with the insurance company’s special locks and couldn’t be opened. I pounded and screamed and shouted Marilyn’s name. Jessica just kept on laughing.

“That’s not going to work, Blosom,” she cried between her fits of laughter. “It’s quite impossible.”

I turned to face her and all I really wanted to do was slap her in the face, but when my hand landed on her and I could feel that cool, cream-softened skin beneath it I couldn’t restrain myself and my fingers crooked by themselves and drove my nails into her skin and pulled. A huge scratch opened across her jaw and she shrieked the way a middle-class housewife screams when you ruin her cherished skin. Blood welled out over the hand she had placed over the wound. I kept listening to that scream. I liked the sound of it, only there was another sound that was drowning it out and at first I didn’t understand what it was, but then I realised it was my own laughter. It was loud, frantic and quite mad.

“Just calm down, Blosom!” Vicente shouted. “You’re totally hysterical.”

Jessica kept screaming and suddenly I felt a sharp pain in one of my arms. Vicente had twisted it up behind my back and was pressing me into the floor. The man whose child I was expecting twisted my arm behind my back and spat into my ear.

“That was quite a scene you staged,” he hissed. “My cat has the right to eat. It’s nature’s way. Eat or be eaten. Eat or be eaten, Blosom, do you understand?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

His hold loosened. Jessica shouted from the kitchen.

“You can stop that howling now, Blosom. All the chicks are in Marilyn’s belly. They’re sound asleep in there, the way children in bellies are supposed to be. Duérmete niño, duérmete ya … ra-ta-ta-ta.”

The pipes were blocked the next day. The house couldn’t deal with anything more either. It finally came to a complete stop and nothing moved — in or out. The plumber arrived and left again. I was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. The house smelled of drains and I was thinking: Forgive him for what he did. He doesn’t know about the child, I haven’t told him about the child, I should have let him know, maybe things really could have changed. He wouldn’t have done what he did if he had known. I sat there for a long time trying to forgive him.

That evening Jessica and Vicente went to bed early. I went into the kitchen and saw her lying bloated in a corner. Here kitty, kitty, I said. Come here, little kitty. I opened a tin of foie gras that the man whose child lay in my belly was no doubt planning to eat at midnight, when it cooled down, along with a glass of chilled white wine. Here kitty, kitty. And the cat came to me, all languid and sated, with her swollen belly. The water was boiling on the stove. I picked her up and put her in. The animal screamed. I put the lid on and turned up the gas. I could hear scratching on the inside of the pan and I had to hold on to the handle for a bit to make sure it didn’t tip over. It was quiet after that and I turned off the gas, and all you could hear was the fridge ticking over. I picked up the bag I had packed and that was waiting for me in the hall and walked to the bus stop.

There was a different coolness to the air. A scent of clean water had blown into the neighbourhood and I thought I could hear a bird singing somewhere.’

‌

I knew what was going on in Mum’s head when Blosom had finished her story. First she thought, this woman’s off her rocker. Then she thought, while that was true, it was the man who had been a beast and sometimes you have to turn into an animal yourself to deal with one.

She sat there just as slumped as Blosom, holding tight to the cup she had drained. She was thinking, if I help her, I’ll be putting something of my own at risk. And, if I do, what’ll happen to what I have now. To my friend from La Complutense? And what’ll happen if I meet a canary man who might not be the man I am waiting for, but a man I could spend the night with in any case, as a distraction? If you help someone you’ve got to do it seriously. There aren’t any half-measures when it comes to helping.

‘I’m as poor as a church mouse,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t afford a luxury like that. And where would you sleep in any case?’

‘I could take Araceli’s room,’ Blosom said without any hesitation. ‘Araceli will soon be of an age when you won’t see her for dust. You should also think about how nice it can be to have a bit of company. We’d be able to sit on the terrace and drink cognac. And talk about our lives, and the future.’

Mum looked at me. I shook my head. I wasn’t prepared to sleep on some sofa. I didn’t want Blosom living with us. I had no illusions about what good people we were. Anyway, seeing as the boat we were in was the sort where the moment you plugged up one hole, another would burst open, how could it support Blosom as well?

‘No,’ Mum said. ‘We don’t need anyone else living here with us. We’re fine just as we are.’

Mum was right about what she said. We were doing fine just as we were and besides we didn’t have any room, no money to pay her with, and I wasn’t prepared to sleep on the sofa in the living room. All the same, three months later, Blosom had moved in with us. And it had started to become more and more obvious that Blosom’s moving in with us was part of a carefully thought-out plan being staged by Alba and Blosom. After Blosom had been to see us and told us her story, Mum would encounter Alba more and more often on the stairs. It was hard not to feel that Alba was standing behind her door listening for the sound of Mum’s footsteps because they just happened to meet far more often during the next few weeks than they had since Alba had moved in. When they started talking, the conversation turned immediately to Blosom, and Alba would tell her about the exquisite dishes Blosom prepared, how beautifully ironed her blouses were because Blosom had ironed them and how lovely and clean and gorgeous everything was down in her flat, all thanks to Blosom. Blosom simply exuded that natural love of cleanliness and tidiness only a person who is acquainted with the deepest filth is capable of. Blosom could make you feel that anything to do with sadness and depression could be banished as long as you could have a hot bath and slip between clean sheets. Thanks to her scars she could make you appreciate life and feel a sense of joy in the small things, which was beyond price, Alba Cambó said. She also said that Valentino, who had had a lot of people to help around the home, didn’t want Blosom to move at all, because he had never felt so well taken care of, so looked after, as on the weekends he spent at Alba’s, and that had nothing to do with Alba as she didn’t have a practical bone in her body, a fact that Valentino had predicted might create a number of stumbling blocks to their future life together (Alba told Mum this as if it were merely an anecdote and seemed not to attach any significance to Valentino’s fears).

Alba started inviting Mum down to her flat. They would sit at the table under the bougainvillea, and the little fountain of holy water hanging on the wall would murmur away. From where I was sitting in our flat on Mum’s deckchair I could hear their laughter and their voices until well into the early hours. Blosom’s laughter cut through the other sounds, it was loud, resounding and unconstrained, and sometimes I used to think there was an undertone of despair in that laugh, despair or something inconsolable that would then quickly fade away among the other voices. I could hear a chair being pulled out and then dragged back in as though someone was constantly getting up from the table and then sitting at it again. I imagined it was Blosom coming and going with carafes whose contents were ice-cold and had orange slices floating around and I could see her serving Mum in lovely glasses with tall stems that Alba Cambó had bought in some exclusive shop on Paseo de Gracia. Whenever Mum came back upstairs after one of those evenings she would be in a good mood. She smelled of smoke and her voice sounded different. She would hum when she wiped off her makeup in the loo and when she went to bed she had the radio on and you could hear the sound of one of the channels that played jazz. And as Blosom would say to me much later on it was not the force of the drip but its persistent nature that made holes in the stone that spring. Slowly but surely, glass of wine upon glass of wine, cigarette upon cigarette and conversation upon conversation, Blosom and Alba succeeded in persuading Mum that it really was a brilliant idea for Blosom to move upstairs. And one morning at breakfast she told me Blosom would be moving up to live with us in a week’s time.

‘Where am I going to sleep?’ I asked.

‘On the sofa in the living room,’ Mum said.

‘Can’t Blosom sleep there?’

Mum shook her head.

‘Blosom needs her privacy. Just think of all she’s been through.’

There was no point discussing it as everything had already been decided. Alba Cambó would continue to pay Blosom a monthly salary and in return Blosom would clean her and the Italian’s flat once or twice a week. The rest of the time she would look after Mum (my name was never mentioned). I would move into the living room. My desk would be placed in one corner along with a lamp and a reading chair. My bed would then be fitted in as well along with a little screen which would ‘make the whole thing a bit more private’.

I said nothing. All that was left was to pack my things and put a good face on it when Blosom arrived.

Freshly combed and perfumed Blosom arrived at our door, carrying a little case in her hand. There was a ceremonial quality to the day. We had cleaned the entire flat and bought flowers that we put in vases. The windows were open and a cross-draught stirred the curtains gently.

‘Is that all?’ Mum said when she opened the door.

‘That’s all,’ Blosom replied.

The case turned out to contain two dresses and a toilet bag, some underwear, an exercise book and a little box in which she kept her spare cash. She went into her room and unpacked while we stood in the doorway looking at her. Do you want some coffee? Mum asked, and Blosom shook her head. Water then? Lemon water? Or juice? Blosom gently shut the door on us. It was a whole day after that before she came out again, only then she took possession of the entire flat with a self-assurance worthy of a queen. She strode into the kitchen, poured water into a wineglass and then went out onto the terrace and looked down at Alba’s. Alba was drinking coffee with Valentino Coraggioso and they both waved at Blosom, who lifted her hand to them in turn like a royal personage passing a crowd in a procession. Mum asked if everything was all right, and Blosom replied that everything was under control. She then went into the toilet where she started moving our things around and also dusting off a shelf where she placed her crocodile-skin toilet bag. When she came out there was a soft fruity smell about the flat. I opened a window. Mum was filing her nails on the sofa. Blosom rearranged the bathroom, stowing away bottles and boxes and then moved swiftly on to pour out all the old perfumes into the bathtub and soon the whole flat was reeking with an unbearable scent of stale Poison. Mum told Blosom off for pouring out the contents of those bottles: they may have been old but the scents had sentimental value. As soon as she dipped her nose into one of those scents she could see the past as clearly as if she was watching a film.

‘If you keep looking in the rear-view mirror, you’ll end up driving off the road,’ was Blosom’s only response, and the empty bottles ended up in a large bag that was put in the hallway.

When she had finished with the bathroom, she moved on to the kitchen. She went to the Chinese shop on the corner and bought little boxes she put the herbs and spices in. Then she wrote their names on the containers in straggly letters. Blosom’s handwriting was the kind of handwriting people have who never write, uncertain and wobbly with awkward letters that often sloped backwards. Now and then I would see her do the oddest things. She once took a handful of coarse salt, opened the kitchen window and threw the salt over her shoulder out the window. When she saw that I had caught her in the act, she gave a start. Why do you do that? I asked. To ward off the evil eye, she said without any hesitation.

I continued driving to school with Valentino every morning. Valentino became even more chatty and talked about relationships and politics. One time he told me that he hated Zapatero for what he had done to the country, because Zapatero had slammed Spain’s face into the mud like the owner who shoves his dog’s face into its own shit whenever it shits indoors. I couldn’t understand the comparison. Valentino said no matter how many nice friends he had on the left, he could never vote for those ‘sad bastards’. The only good thing about this country during rule by the left was that the food was still just about okay. Compared with Germany in any case, he said. I didn’t understand what Germany had to do with it. They eat dog food in Germany, Valentino said. And when you eat dog food every day, you end up becoming a dog.

What are you supposed to reply to something like that? You say nothing. You just keep looking out the window. And then he said, to provoke me further:

‘So that school of yours is, I take it, a sort of refuge for girls who are too ugly to be models and too stupid to be engineers.’

Another time, one rainy day at the end of autumn, he stopped the car in a parking spot behind a shopping centre and told me about the time he and Alba went wandering around Barcelona, believing they were going to be happy and get married on a hill outside Albarracín.