Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

‌Heureux, comme avec une femme?

My first encounter with Gestiones Commerciales took place that autumn, in October. When I saw the man I was supposed to meet, I realised immediately I wouldn’t be able to make love and I can see, as I write this, how the insight of that moment was fitting reward for the naivety I had brought to the role of a professional — not even that summer with Muriel and Paco Parra in Perellot had managed to rid me of the notion that love ought to be a precondition for physical intercourse.

And there was a stiffness to the man in question, a quality that was inhibited and unlovable and didn’t fit with the gaiety of the hotel lobby where we met. The lobby had mirrors whose surfaces were blotched with black spots and indulgent in that they made you look hazy and blurred. You were forgiven everything in advance because they made allowances for every defect. The look that Rodrigo Auscias gave me, on the other hand, was searching and remote right from the start. It stole slowly over my face, inspecting every distortion, pore and other blemish that Muriel had failed to conceal with her make-up box, and then moved downward towards my shoulders and my neckline which plunged deeper than usual that evening. A drop of sweat squeezed itself out of the hollow of my knee and ran down into my shoe. This is impossible, I thought, and even considered saying I wasn’t who I was. And I wasn’t waiting for anyone, and was just about to leave. I closed my book, put it in my bag and stood up. That was when he put out his hand and said:

‘My name is Rodrigo Auscias. I have a room on the third floor with a view over the city. You’re Araceli, I take it?’

It was Muriel who persuaded me. Not directly, not by saying: ‘Araceli, it’s time you got out there and sold yourself,’ but by her example. Muriel always had money at the time and, although that hadn’t been a problem at the beginning, eventually money became a very precise dividing line between the person Muriel was when she was with me and when she was with other people. I was the person she could go for a walk in the park with, have a cup of tea at an outdoor café and then chat with for hours over that cup of tea, which, while it was a source of pleasure and the kind of thing everyone really needed, ‘didn’t actually change anything’. There were other things that could change you from the inside, other things that could bring you closer to a deeper and genuine sense of being, but all those activities had costs attached. Flying wasn’t free, nor was having a wardrobe that expressed who you were and it wasn’t free to share the essence of a real night with someone, if you were being continually obliged to measure everything in coin. Muriel came up with the answers: As you make your bed, so you must lie on it, and God helps those who help themselves.

That was something else that was typical of Muriel — all those proverbs, those clichés, she based her communication on. There was always something that would fit the bill. And if one proverb didn’t feel right, its opposite would; there was never any one truth you could stick to. For Muriel Ruiz truths were like sheets fluttering in the wind — they kept switching sides and sometimes they got tangled up in themselves. Sometimes they just hung there, heavy and unglamorous and drenched with rain. They weren’t something you could respect, in her view. Not the sort of thing you can have any respect for, not in the long term, she said and stubbed out her fag end with her heel.

‘The way I see it, Araceli, you’ve got no choice,’ was what she said. ‘Whatever you do has to lead somewhere. Otherwise life ends up just being a minor series of meaningless sex acts that don’t lead to pregnancy.’

She nodded as though she had said something really clever. Metaphors were not really Muriel’s strong point, seeing as despite all her emancipation as a woman she could, comically, sound like a figure from the Old Testament.

I looked at her. Muriel and her moisturised skin, her eyelashes coated in several layers of expensive mascara, sweetly and gently perfumed, and holding her white cigarette with a gold circle at the base in one hand. At some point you have to decide whether you’re going to live or die, she repeated. If you decide to live, all you have to do is make a start. Find sources of income, make the best of what you’ve got.

‘Okay,’ I said in the end.

She took out the business card from her pocket, rang the number and spoke in confidence to someone who sounded as if they were writing down my name.

After a few days a lady rang me with a hoarse voice that I thought was a man’s at first.

‘Hello, Araceli. I’ve got a client here we could start with.’

The man who had requested the agency’s services was a quite ordinary man. ‘A perfectly ordinary man,’ the voice said. ‘No funny business at all.’

‘You’re meeting at six pm at the Hotel Nouvel; it’s on one of the lanes near Puerta del Ángel. Clean and simple, that’s our policy, and no funny business.’

The following evening I was walking along Catalunya. The shop windows were large and generous and my reflection made me look like I had been corseted and polished. Muriel had helped, lending me things from her wardrobe and fussing with my face so its distortions ended up looking like exotic features instead. She had drawn in black pencil along the edges of my upper and lower lashes and pressed in where the lines met and then put her little finger into the corner of the eye and pulled straight out. I had put up a fight at first. Then I just settled for her toning it down a bit. She painted my lips with the same shade of crimson she usually wore.

The lobby of the Hotel Nouvel was almost devoid of people. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and there were paintings on the walls with baroque frames that, along with the mirrors, lent the hotel an air of decadence and decline — only these were imperfections quite unlike the ones I was used to because in this place they evoked life, adventure and glamour. I took a seat and realised, though not right at that moment, that I had arrived too early. That realisation would take another few minutes. It was only when I had been sitting in one of the velvet-covered chairs in the hotel lobby for almost thirty minutes that I looked at the clock and realised I must have arrived at least a quarter of an hour before I was due. Turning up too early was unforgivable in a business like this. Punctuality cast a shadow of the everyday, a pedestrian boringness, over even the most decadent professional. It was too late now, though, I couldn’t back out; I couldn’t just quit the field without meeting the person I had come here to see.

I got out a book. I sat there for a long time, staring at the open page in my lap. Then it dawned on me that people who read books tend to turn the pages of the books they are reading, and so I turned the page of the book. And the very moment I was turning the page I got the feeling that the man I was supposed to be meeting was looking at me.

I leant back in the armchair in the lobby. Then I thought that was ridiculous and put the book down in my lap. That was when, exactly twenty minutes after the appointed time, I heard a voice behind me:

‘Sorry I’m so late. What are you reading?’

He put out his hand.

‘My name is Rodrigo Auscias. I have a room on the third floor with a view over the city. You’re Araceli, I take it?’

Rodrigo Auscias’ eyes were clear, like shallow water or just like a place where all the water had drained away. We went up to his room, which was small with a large bed in the middle. I felt embarrassed that the bed was so large — it was as if it was obvious right from the outset that that was the place where our time together would be spent. Auscias invited me to sit in one of the chairs. I sat down and tried to hold my knees in so they wouldn’t touch the bed. He sat in the chair beside me and gave me a glass of something bubbly, acidic and cheap.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he said.

‘Because I need money.’

‘Isn’t there anything else you could do?’

‘Like what?’

With that I assumed that the obligatory pause for conversation was over. Muriel had warned me about it and advised me to get it over with as soon as possible, because if you got bogged down it was like stepping on chewing gum that would be stuck to your foot for the rest of the walk. We could now proceed to the next part of our encounter. Rodrigo Auscias was sitting stiffly in his chair, observing me while I was wondering how to go about it. Were you supposed to remain seated, waiting for him to take the initiative, or move closer to him and unbutton the top button of his shirt? Or start undoing your own instead?

‘Is this the first time you’ve done this?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘I can see that.’

‘Does it show? How?’

Rodrigo Auscias scratched his scalp while thinking.

‘You ought to go in for a different line of work,’ he said then.

I shrugged my shoulders. Auscias drained his glass.

‘It’s just I didn’t think people like you really existed,’ he said.

I cleared my throat.

‘As long as there are people like you, there’ll be people like me. Shall we get started?’

I stood up and took one of my shoes off.

‘Do you know that the skin disease scabies is caused by a tiny spider that burrows under the skin?’ Rodrigo Auscias said then.

He was looking directly behind me, out the window, and in that light his irises shone yellow like beer in sunlight.

‘What?’ I said.

‘That’s right. I read it in the paper on the way here. The itching afterwards is a complete nightmare.’

He stared at the empty air and seemed to forget that I was there for a brief moment. I sat on the bedspread.

‘Araceli,’ he said then and put his wineglass on the bedside table. ‘Couldn’t we just lie here on the bed? Just lie here and not say anything of any consequence at all?’

I had heard about johns like him. Who really just want to talk. It made Muriel furious. Selling your body was one thing — but your mind, that was prostitution on an unparalleled scale.

‘There’s a different rate for talking,’ I said, without meeting his eyes.

‘How much?’

‘Double. At the very least.’

‘Okay then,’ he said. ‘Let’s say that. You’ll get double the rate if you can put up with listening to me for a bit.’

I lay down next to Rodrigo Auscias with my hands across my chest. Our shoulders touched. Rodrigo Auscias continued talking for a bit about the article he had read in the paper, about the spider and scabies and some other skin diseases he had also read about. Then he talked about lice that had become resistant to delousing treatments. Then he talked about a treatment for obesity that consisted of a substance that was extracted from bulls’ testicles. I said he seemed to be obsessed by illnesses and asked if he was a doctor. He didn’t reply to that. Instead he told me that he had a tendency to gain weight, particularly at certain times of the year like Christmas and summer. At that point I dozed off for a bit. I woke up when he said that his wife was as thin as a stick, on the other hand, and had never had any problems with her weight. So you have got a wife as well, you bastard, was what I wanted to say to that, but my throat felt thick with sleep and my mouth refused to open. There was total silence then. After that Rodrigo Auscias lit a cigarette and lay there blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. We watched the smoke rings slowly changing shape and getting tangled up in one another. I thought about Muriel Ruiz’ sheets. I had a sip from the glass on the bedside table and then mentioned them to him, Muriel Ruiz’ truths that changed shape all the time like his smoke rings. Like sheets hung out to dry on a line. They weren’t something you could rely on, or even lean against. I thought he would ask who Muriel Ruiz was but he didn’t. Instead all he said was:

‘The only person you ever have is yourself.’

Then his breathing changed. It became quieter, and I thought he had fallen asleep. We lay there like that, and I was wondering what would happen now. Only suddenly I heard him say:

‘Araceli. Let me be completely honest. Coming here wasn’t my idea.’

He lay on his side, looking at me as if he were going to say something very important.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I was sent here.’

‘Who by?’

‘Alba Cambó.’

‘What? What’s she got to do with this?’

‘When she found out you’d got in touch with the agency, she rang me and arranged for … She set this up. So it would be me, and not someone who might hurt you.’

‘How does she know about it?’

‘No idea. Someone tattled, I suppose. Your mother, maybe?’

I remembered Blosom’s silence. Fuck. I was forced to look away because my face was on fire and it felt like there were tears in my eyes. I had thought I was going to be working. I had got Muriel involved, I had worried, I had worked up the courage, and then sat there like a lady and forgot to turn the pages of the book. I had actually got involved in the business of being a professional. And then a john comes along who isn’t a john, but a hired babysitter.

‘I bet you’re having a good laugh at me,’ I said and got up. ‘On the inside I mean.’

‘I’m not laughing at anyone,’ Auscias said sadly. ‘You were just someone who thought this is how things work. It’s all part of it, trying things out, taking the paths you find ahead of you. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘I’m not ashamed,’ I said and immediately regretted the sharpness of my tone.

He looked at the floor.

‘Are you a virgin?’ he said after a while.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘And … perhaps you think you’re a bit too old to still be one?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought this might be an opportunity to … well.’

‘You mustn’t think that way. You’ve got to promise me. You may think it doesn’t matter how you do it, only it really will matter later on when you get older and think back. You mustn’t give yourself to someone you don’t want.’

‘I thought maybe you didn’t seem that bad.’

Auscias laughed aloud.

‘You may not be very good at selling yourself, Araceli, but you’re even worse at lying. That kind of thing grows on you; the attraction has to take its time. You see the person. You start fantasising about them. Then suddenly one day you’ve got there, and it’s all wonderful.’

It sounded cool when he said that. ‘Then suddenly one day you’ve got there and it’s all wonderful.’

‘That doesn’t sound very likely,’ I said.

Auscias shrugged his shoulders.

‘That’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to find the right person.’

‘I already found one person,’ I said. ‘A person who would do. His name is Benicio Mercader and he lives in Perpignan.’

‘In that case you should have looked him up instead of coming here,’ Auscias said.

‘I’ve no idea how to find someone like him.’

‘I might be able to help you at some point,’ said Auscias. ‘I’m good at finding people.’

The idea of finding Benicio Mercader felt suddenly exhilarating. I laughed to myself. The thought of seeing him ten years on and being able to tell him, I have thought about you the whole time and now I am here. Have you longed for me as much as I have longed for you? And Benicio Mercader wouldn’t just be some sick, old lover. Benicio Mercader would have answered yes. Even if it wasn’t true, because it wouldn’t have been. He would have answered yes, and I would have believed him because men like him are good at lying. Men like him would never want to see a woman trying to give him something of her own fall apart in front of their eyes, and if a lie was the price for their concern, they wouldn’t hesitate to tell one.

‘Maybe,’ I said. Maybe one day.

I started putting on my shoes.

‘Is it all right if I take off now then?’ I said. ‘Now we both know this is a sham, we could go our separate ways.’

‘Araceli,’ he said and looked distressed. ‘I would appreciate it if you could stay with me tonight all the same.’

‘Now I really don’t get it,’ I said.

‘I need to talk,’ he said. ‘I felt really glad about the turn of events when you mentioned the double rate. I was thinking this girl is clever, and I can benefit from that. I was looking forward to just lying here and having someone to listen to me. I’ll pay what we agreed.’

‘Haven’t you got a wife who’ll listen to you?’ I asked.

‘A wife who’ll listen to me!’ Auscias cried. ‘That shows you don’t know anything about being married.’

‘Or a dad, or a mate then,’ I said. ‘Someone who knows you. You don’t know me after all.’

‘I have spoken to friends and psychologists. And it all felt so pointless, not one of them understood and I don’t even understand myself. So that’s why it occurred to me that if only I got the chance to tell someone the whole thing from the very beginning in the course of a single night, to go through it all over again and assemble the bits one by one, the bit that came before and the bit after, to create a kind of sequence, then maybe I would be able to see the logic of it all. And that even if things don’t have a meaning, maybe they have a context at least.’

‘Not a meaning but a context?’

I didn’t understand what he meant.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

I looked at the clock. It was ten. Muriel was bound to have already finalised her plans for the evening, and there wouldn’t have been any point going round the bars looking for her. So I might just as well lie here and earn a packet.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘Would you mind if I read you a poem?’ Auscias said.

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘We’re on your time now. I’m just the listener.’

He smiled at me, and although his eyes were still beer-coloured, they looked happy. He got out of bed and went over to his bag. He got out a thin volume and sat in one of the chairs. Then he opened the book, cleared his throat and started reading:

I am dying of sadness and alcohol

he said to me over the bottle

on a soft Thursday afternoon

in an old hotel room by the train depot.

‘To be perfectly honest,’ I interrupted him. ‘I’ve never really liked poems that much. I’ve been to a few readings together with my friend Muriel who knows a fair bit about that sort of thing. And we’ve watched poets at those events reading from their books while people sit around them having a sleep, and the ones who weren’t asleep didn’t understand a thing. Only no one ever gets up and shouts: Hang on. What is it you’re really trying to say?’

‘Poems can be a bit like that,’ Auscias said. ‘But it’s really about habit. If you try to get inside them and understand them properly, they can become a light that illuminates your entire existence. Just listen to this:

meat is cut as roses are cut

men die as dogs die

love dies like dogs die,

he said.

And then this:

Love needs too much help, he said.

hate takes care of itself.

‘Do you see? Love needs too much help, but hate takes care of itself. That’s exactly the way it is. Exactly like that. That is so well put.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And then this:

stick with the thorn

stick with the bottle

stick with the voices of old men in hotel rooms.’

I was fit to burst with laughter. That was exactly what I was doing right then after all. I was sitting in a hotel room with a glass in my hand together with Rodrigo Auscias. Only I didn’t want to point that out to him. I assumed we were hearing different things in those words, and maybe he didn’t think of himself as old in any case.

‘And so to the finish,’ he went on, ‘it’s so dead right.’

is that what all the noise is, I said,

my god shit.’

‘So that’s how it ends? Like that?’ I said.

‘Just that. Nothing else. Just my god shit, a door slamming shut in the reader’s face.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s by Bukowski,’ he said and closed the book.

‘Oh, right,’ I said.

‘But it wasn’t Bukowski we were going to talk about,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said.

Auscias sat in silence for a bit. Then he began his story.

‌

‘There had always been an attraction between Alba Cambó and me. A tension we never allowed to get the upper hand because we always behaved as we were supposed to and only met every six months or so, mostly when we ran into each other in the street. We would go into a café then and talk about what was going on at work and in our lives in general. More often than not it was about what was going on at work rather than our lives in general. Although on one occasion I had moved, on another she had bought a boat, and on a third she had resigned from her job and started freelancing. And once she put me in touch with someone, a man with a timber yard from her village. That contact turned out to be very profitable for me, and only a few months later the owner of the timber yard in question had become my biggest customer. I kept feeling I should repay her for that. Even though I had no idea how, I used to think about it every so often: how I could make it up to Alba Cambó for giving me that contact in the timber trade. But no good opportunity ever arose. I just tried to be nice to her in general to make her feel she could turn to me if she ever needed to. There was this one time she arrived at our meeting, her eyes hollow and red with weeping, and told me that her mother had died. She also told me she had inherited a house in a small town and wanted to sell it. I put my hand on her shoulder at that point. Apart from that we never touched one another in all that time.

If ever I said anything about my private life, it would be to mention the courses Bret and I went on, and, if Bret had won a competition, I used to show her whatever picture I had on my mobile. She was always polite on those occasions and would say “like master, like dog” and while that should really be treated as a compliment, we never dwelt on half-baked things like that. We just looked away instead and maybe asked for more coffee or said something completely unrelated. When I talked about my work, I used to tell her mostly about the stuff I did with young people in my spare time. I must have thought that was the part of my life that would interest an outsider most and that it was easiest to find common denominators with people you don’t know very well in books and through reading. Although I did sometimes talk about the timber trade and then I found it impossible not to mention the timber market and its regressive structure. I thought having to listen to all the details would bore her to death. I could hear my own voice, after all, and it often used to strike me that I sounded far too worked up, and I was very aware of the contrast between my own angrily impassioned patter and that cool and kindly way she had of listening. I would sometimes feel extremely uncomfortable in those situations, as though I had been exposed or caught out, it’s hard to pin down, in any case I kept going back to the subject of books.

Eventually I worked out that my attempts to impress Alba Cambó with the books I had read and the writers I was familiar with were completely pointless as few people are as genuinely un-literary as she is. That might sound slightly daft in retrospect given that she actually had some things published in Semejanzas, but even then she had read nothing, although she never seemed to suffer from the sense of inferiority that can afflict some people who have never read anything. She just smiled, and was always interested and friendly, and said she didn’t read books. If I asked why, her facial expression would change, and she could look genuinely concerned when she explained the reasons, like a person who has tried to climb a rock wall and failed and now finds herself back at the base coming up with explanations for her failure such as the incline was such-and-such, the weather conditions were unfavourable, or some other assertion about circumstances that were beyond anyone’s control. She had grown up in a home without any books; she had never experienced their appeal as a child. Her father had died before she was born; her mother’s nerves were weak and she never went out of the house. All I learnt as a child were simple pleasures, Alba said. I imagined her when very young, walking in parks or having a boyfriend of her own she spent the afternoons with. Sometimes when I took Bret out for a walk through one of the parks in Barcelona and the soil was wet with rain and giving off heady scents the way it does in the evenings, I would see young couples entwined on the benches and oblivious of the world around them. I used to think then that that must have been how Alba Cambó spent the hours she devoted to ‘simple pleasures’. But when I asked her she laughed and said it wasn’t like that at all. She had smoked on the sly, necked in churchyards, driven round in cars with people she didn’t know. “Lived, just lived.”

I soon gave up any ambition I had to talk to her about literature. I continued talking about my timber goods. Alba always listened attentively and also asked questions that made me sometimes think she was genuinely interested in what I did.

I never talked about Encarnación.

We had known one another in this rather superficial way for almost three years when I got a message from her on my mobile one morning at the beginning of the holidays. It’s odd, she wrote, that you live so nearby but we never get to see each other at home. Why don’t you come over today and Ilich and I will light the grill? Let me know if you can’t come, otherwise we’ll expect you at nine.

I thought about it for a while before responding. During the time we had known one another there had been a tacit agreement between us that we would not involve anyone else. Whoever her partners might be, my dog, my family, these were other spaces we might mention to one another en passant but would never enter together. And until now everything had remained pleasantly undefined. There had been a great sense of ease in our relationship despite the thoughts I have just described. And now she wanted me to join her partner and her to grill some chops? A partner I had never heard her say a word about besides. Although she had just mentioned him as if it were the most natural thing in the world: and Ilich and I will light the grill.

I racked my brains. Was I making too much of it? What harm could there be in a barbecue on a June evening? And as for her having a partner she had never mentioned, maybe that was the very thing she was trying to do now. And maybe meeting like this would be a way of getting closer, of really getting to know one another’s worlds? It shouldn’t be making me recoil. It was the natural evolution any relationship is bound to follow. Over time you get closer to one another — that’s the way things work and that is how it is supposed to be. And ultimately you could say that is the only positive function time has — it gives people the opportunity to deepen relationships and get to know one another better. That is what I was thinking, along with one or two other things. And I felt disappointed when I arrived at the conclusion that I wasn’t keen on accepting her invitation to deepen our friendship, and that it was making me tired and uncomfortable. Had I been infected by my wife’s introversion? Encarnación liked to say that people were, in essence, like the stock for a sauce, like the stuff you can buy in a bottle in a store. You could dilute it any number of ways, you could add port, cream and herbs, you could jazz it up however you liked, but the stock always remained the same, and sooner or later the taste would force its way through like a nauseating odour from the underworld. It made no difference how much enthusiasm you entered a relationship with, or what blinders you put on, or the kind of games you were intending to play. Sooner or later those fumes would force their way through.

“I like having acquaintances,” she would say. “But God preserve me from friends.”

It was, in all probability, the abysmal nature of this reasoning together with the sight of my wife sitting bent over her crossword that made me accept Alba’s invitation in the end.

Of course I’ll come, I wrote back. Should I bring anything in particular?

A good mood … she replied with a smiley.

I wondered what those three dots meant. I couldn’t help thinking that they felt like an insinuation. But then again, what possible importance could someone who never reads attach to three dots?

Encarnación was still sitting on the balcony solving crossword puzzles when I came out to tell her about Alba’s invitation.

“Wouldn’t you know it, I’ve been invited to dinner tonight,” I said.

“Oh yes?” she said and looked up.

“A superficial acquaintance I’ve known for several years. She lives in the city.”

Encarnación nodded at me. I told her that the superficial acquaintance was called Alba and that I had got to know her on a business trip a few years ago.

“She’s a friend of a friend,” I explained. “She came up with a business contact for me in Caudal.”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Encarnación said putting her pen down. “If you want to go to dinner at the house of someone you know, you obviously should. I’m not running a kennel. You are a free man, Rodrigo Auscias.”

What did that mean? Was she pulling my leg? Rodrigo Auscias. I’m not running a kennel. What a bizarre way of putting it. She’s on her own too much, I thought. Her thoughts are starting to go round in circles; they end up going nowhere and then get themselves tied in knots. She is suffocating. I have to get out. Spend time with superficial and uneducated people, people who don’t think, people who won’t distress you. People who aren’t bitter and ugly, people who …

Eventually I found myself facing the mirror in the hallway, persuading myself that something was going to become more profound; I would be getting closer to another person and at the same time further away from myself. Two birds with one stone. I smiled at myself in the mirror. My teeth were disagreeably even. Like someone who has to sell baby wipes and needs to make an impeccable impression on mothers mechanically changing nappies. My hair looked exaggeratedly neat as well. My eyebrows were perfectly arranged as was the collar of my shirt. How the hell did I turn out like this? I thought. In the mirror I could make out our tidy hall, the kitchen and then the living room and the window furthest away. In the corner of the mirror that reflected the sitting room I could see Encarnación’s figure bent slightly over the balcony table concentrating on her crossword. The plants looked splendidly restrained in their pots. Several sharpened pencils with nibs that created sharp little silhouettes were positioned in a container in front of her.

“Town in Italy four letters?” she said.

“Pisa,” I answered.

A little bird was perched on the balcony rail. Encarnación looked up for a moment, staring at the bird. The bird looked at her. They sat like that for a second or two before Encarnación looked down at the table again and the pencil started moving. The bird flew off. She remained where she was. She would soon get up, at the same moment perhaps that the door closed behind me. Maybe she would heave a sigh of relief, go into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Maybe she would open and close the cupboards. I had seen her do that. She would go into the kitchen, open doors and then close them. Not to get anything, just to stare at the shelves inside with their glasses and plates, farting sometimes when she thought no one could hear. Then she might get out a cookbook, browse through it and then put it away. Then back to the sofa by the television where someone would keep talking, all predigested stuff handed to you on a plate, and she would be sitting there, sometimes dozing, sometimes commenting on what was happening on the screen. And I would be there beside her. With her boredom like a shackle around my ankle, a dead weight dragging me to the bottom of the sea, filling me with a tepid idleness that made any life outside our four walls an impossibility.

I laughed at the face in the mirror. Alba Cambó! I thought and walked to the door.

A few days before, Encarnación had told me about a dream she had had. She told me about it over breakfast. In the dream she had put an advert about wanting a room in the paper. A woman who introduced herself as an accountant had rung her to say that she had a room to let. Encarnación had gone to see the room and agreed to rent it. The accountant had shown her the rest of the flat. They would have to share a kitchen and sitting room, and there was a cage with two rabbits in on the balcony. They would have to feed one each, the accountant said. Encarnación had thought it would have been better to split the routine and feed them both every other day, but the accountant had insisted they each feed their respective rabbit daily. There was another flat next door, and Encarnación had tried to look into it from the balcony. Inside she could see parts of red sofas reflected in a lot of mirrors that broke up the view and made it impossible to get any sense of the room as a whole. Only she could see parts of people in some of the mirrors. Faces sitting on the red sofas and staring straight ahead. There are people in there, Encarnación had said to the accountant. It’s a mental hospital, the accountant replied. The people sitting in there are catatonic, but they have to be tied down anyway. They wake up suddenly and then they go mad. The dream continued. Encarnación fed one of the rabbits, and the accountant fed the other. One day Encarnación’s rabbit escaped and she ran after it trying to catch it but could only get hold of one of its back legs. She could feel the leg jerking as the rabbit struggled to get free but she lugged it home and put it back in the cage. On another day the accountant said she needed to carry out a test on Encarnación, who answered all the questions the accountant put to her, and they were silly and ridiculous questions such as which of two skirts did she think was best, or which of two lipsticks did she think was prettiest. Completely silly things, Encarnación said when she told me the dream. Why are you asking me? she said in the end. I don’t care, the accountant replied. It’s him up there who wants to know. She pointed towards the roof of the opposite building and up there was a man. He was too far away for Encarnación to see his face, but she could make out that he had his arms crossed over his chest and his face was dark. What does he want to know about me? Everything, the accountant had replied. Although Encarnación felt angry, she answered the questions as best she could. She was also trying to make a good impression on the man with her answers. She was ashamed of this in the dream, she said when she told me, and I’m still ashamed of it now that I’m telling you about it but I’m telling you anyway, it is just a dream.

I had a lot of questions once she had finished. Why had she put an advert in the paper for a room? (Where was I in the dream? That question was impossible to ask.) And what did the sofas look like? Were they covered in pale red leather or dark red velvet? There is an enormous difference. Just saying a ‘red sofa’ is not saying anything at all. What did the man on the roof of the building opposite look like? Like me? Like some other man? I wanted to ask her all this when she had finished but she didn’t seem to want to talk about the dream any more. So I said that the dream was easy to interpret, that the red room was her unconscious, that the man on the roof was her superego and that the rabbit was her desire for freedom. Then she asked why the people on the red sofas were catatonic. I had no idea how to answer that and we said nothing more about the dream.

I was not unhappy with Encarnación. I may have been bored from time to time, but I wasn’t unhappy. We were not at the brink of despair like so many other couples. We hadn’t allowed ourselves to be put through the mangle of therapy like many of our friends. We hadn’t learnt to trot out, tiredly and with dull eyes, those rote phrases about it not being a question of happiness but of balance and it wasn’t about desire but about satisfaction, and that as long as you have your lists of things you’re supposed to do and you have sex three times a week and two kids then everything is under control. I have got many friends like that and I know that they will never be happy, nor will they find the balance or joy they talk about. They have been thinking the wrong thoughts for too long. Give them the slightest bit to drink and without fail they will start talking about meaninglessness; they will explore it from every angle and aspect. They believe the fact that it sometimes troubles them is a huge mistake, a misunderstanding, a delusion, but that is not the case at all. The sense of meaninglessness that many of my friends suffer from is the truest part of their experience. But they can never get at it, because they spend all their time explaining it away, trying to relieve the symptoms. They are what we call in the trade “damaged goods”. I once said that at a dinner. They looked at me as if I were a terrorist. Then they filled their glasses and continued talking about meaninglessness and an automatic mower that someone had just bought.

Once, when I was with my family at the beach at Salou during my teenage years I saw a couple walking along the beach. A man and a woman who must have been at least sixty. The woman wore an emerald-green bathing costume and had shoulder-length grey hair, and the man was wearing an unbuttoned beach shirt that fluttered behind his hips in the wind. They both had large dark sunglasses on and were attractively tanned. The evening sun had cloaked everything in a golden light, and their shadows extended far out over the water. It was a beautiful sight in purely visual terms but what fascinated me most was that they were talking to each other. They were so involved in a conversation that they had to stop every now and then to look at one another while they continued gesticulating passionately and amicably. I didn’t let them out of my sight. It was as though I had seen the incarnation of a happy relationship — although not between young, beautiful and sturdy people but between people who had shared their everyday existence for almost a whole lifetime, who had settled into it and realised that it was a protection and not a threat.

Even if I wasn’t quite there yet (to say that Encarnación and I were as happy as the couple I saw on the beach as a child would have been an exaggeration), I managed to persuade myself that we had come a good bit along the way. I could still be filled with tenderness when looking at her, more frequently in fact than when we first met. Encarnación used to sit outside on the terrace of the flat we lived in; sometimes she solved crossword puzzles and sometimes she would look at the terraces on the other side of the street. The woman who lived on the ground floor of the building opposite had a home help who came to clean her flat, and Encarnación could sit looking in fascination at that woman as she cleaned with the doors open to the sitting room. I could never understand what was so exciting about a person doing the cleaning, but Encarnación had soon learnt which days the woman came and then she would put her chair on the terrace and sit there until the other woman had finished, following her with her eyes while the crossword or the book lay untouched on the table in front of her. Sometimes a slight unconscious smile would appear on her face. I have no idea what she was thinking but something would catch in my throat, and I would think I love her so much.

I explained the sadness that came over me in waves as a natural event. I didn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the fact that at times Encarnación seemed closed off and out of sorts. Everything comes in cycles, I thought. It will soon be spring, and everything will feel different again, or we will make a trip to the mountains in a bit and return with our batteries recharged. It will all turn out right in the end, it always does.

The building Alba lived in was grander than I expected. There were ornaments all over the facade and the tops of flowering shrubs could be seen behind a high wall. A bored-looking concierge who sat in a little cabin just inside the entrance raised his chin at me in what I took to be a greeting. A long, wide and dusty staircase led up to Alba’s flat. There was an air of decay about the landing. Dried flowers stood in pots outside her door and there were spiderwebs in the window that gave on to the street. A withered apricot sat on the window ledge and when I inspected it more closely I could see that someone had taken a bite out of it. I rang the bell, and it was Ilich who opened the door. He looked like a builder. Short and stocky, not a hair on his head, and eyes that were slightly cloudy as though covered in a film of dust. He put out his hand. I put out mine too and felt his, which was cool and limp. He must have thought the opposite, because he put on an expression of pain when I gripped his hand. Easy does it, he said and I didn’t care for his tone. Alba came towards us down the hall. Come in, she said. This is Ilich. Ilich said nothing. Why don’t we sit out here, said Alba and we went out onto the balcony. Ilich was silent for almost the entire first part of the evening, and Alba wasn’t particularly talkative either. I felt pretty uncomfortable with the situation and kept talking; I told them about a book I had bought and hadn’t finished and that was still lying half-read on the table next to my bed. Then I said something about your right as the reader to put down books that failed to grip you. Ilich and Alba kept nodding but their eyes were glassy as though they were thinking about something entirely different. Alba poured more wine into my glass. The food that was served wasn’t up to much. A few overcooked steaks that Ilich shoved rather sloppily onto our plates, accompanied by some endive with blue cheese. The silence remained heavy and oppressive the whole time; the conversation never got going and I kept drinking, hoping the time would pass and I could go back home. I must have got drunk quite quickly because I was soon telling them about something I had read in the paper that morning, an item about a man who had tried to balance on some logs in a harbour. He had fallen into the water and been sucked out by the current. His body was found floating face down a few hours later. I see, said Alba when I had finished. What’s the point of telling a bloody awful story like that? Ilich said and wiped his mouth. He reached for the bread and broke off a bit he swiped across his plate and that turned brown from the burnt food and the fat. What? I said. I couldn’t understand how I had offended him by telling the story about the man who drowned in the harbour. Alba smiled at Ilich and then at me. I raised my shoulders. You may be thinking it’s odd that I brought the two of you together like this, Alba said. Only the thing is, you both work in the same business. Well more or less. In any case you both work in the same industry and I think you could both gain something by getting to know one another. Rodrigo, you know the timber trade in this country and Ilich is trying to get ahead in it too, although without any real success so far. But, she added, I think Ilich has got the right grain. (She laughed at her own expression.) Then she started talking about the things I had told her. With a richness of detail entirely alien to Alba Cambó, she reproduced my metaphor about Maderas Del Pozo as a huge turd that was blocking any progress in the intestine that was the Spanish market. Then she described the manoeuvring by the old guard, who were doing all they could to keep new ideas at bay. She used the exact words I had used when I described them as “toads” and “blocks of wood”. I tried to interrupt her — what I had told her had been said in confidence, or maybe not even in confidence: they were the kind of thing you confide in someone you believe you can trust absolutely. They were not the sort of thing anyone else in the timber trade was ever supposed to hear, particularly not someone like Ilich, an opportunist upstart, who was trying to get ahead and was bound to use the same information either to make an impression at some event or for purely practical ends. I was too drunk by then to have any clear understanding of how what Alba had been saying could be directed against me, but I had some sense of how useful it might be. Ilich grinned at me from the sofa. The Confessions of a Successful Gentleman, said Ilich when Alba had finished talking. That was a really juicy titbit. Really great. He nodded to himself. Well it’s not really like that, I said. You’ve blown the whole thing out of all proportion, Alba. I’m only using your very own words, Don Rodrigo,” she said then, and she and Ilich laughed loudly at the “Don Rodrigo”.

Suddenly I was longing for Encarnación sitting by the balcony rail looking at the little bird. How tainted everything is, I thought.

Alba got up from the sofa. Rodrigo, she said, could you come with me into the kitchen and help serve the dessert? I got up and followed her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ilich pick up the remote from the coffee table and put the television on. I closed the door behind us when we went into the kitchen. The room was small and smelled of fried food. There was a hatrack on one of the walls, and plaits of garlic, baskets of herbs and eggs and a teapot were hanging from the hooks. Besides the smell of burnt meat, the kitchen was untidy in a casual way, not at all orderly and antiseptic the way Encarnación liked it. Alba got out a chopping board and started slicing a watermelon. Have you known one another long? I asked. Alba shook her head. Not at all, no. I’ve known him for a few weeks. Two months at the most. I had imagined your boyfriend would be different, I said. Different in what way? Alba asked. I’m not sure, I said. Someone more like us. Someone with a proper job in any case. Just a bit more normal, I don’t know how to put it. Ilich seems so … I was looking for the right word. He’s a huge mistake, Alba said, turning towards me. A huge bloody mistake from start to finish is what he is. She put down the knife and dried her hands on a towel hanging on the oven door. The worst thing is, she went on, I knew he would be a mistake from the very beginning. So why did you start seeing him then? I asked. She turned her back to me and started putting the melon slices onto a large dish. You’re probably not going to believe this, she began, but the answer is he could boss me around. He’d say to me, “This is what you’re going to do,” or “Pull yourself together, for God’s sake.” He was ironic and sarcastic when I did things wrong. He was exotic, that’s all it was. No one who knows me properly would dare do that. I thought that was incredibly sexy. I see, I said. Alba nodded to herself. The problem, she said then, when you begin a relationship with someone rough and ready like that is that there’s no getting rid of them afterwards. Ilich believes there’s something between us and I’m starting to think he’s already imagining us having a future together. It’s a feature of the simple mind that it believes in simple solutions of the “since we’ve been getting on well for a while, we’re bound to go on doing so for the rest of our lives” type. That’s the way Ilich sees our shared future: a landing strip already laid out and covered in asphalt. She held her arms (and the knife) out straight in front of her as if to create an image of the landing strip. And now I’ve got to deal with the hangover. Because how am I going to get rid of him? She turned round and threw her arms in the air. And that was what made me think of you. What? I said. I stared at her. Everything she was saying felt impossible to take in. That’s right, you see I thought you could give him a helping hand. You’ve got contacts after all, you’re a success. That was why I suggested we invite you here to see what you might be able to do for him, if you could find some common ground. Common ground, I said. What do you mean by that? You know, however you want to put it, Alba said. We’ll just have to see if it’ll work out. It would be nice if we could avoid coming to blows. What? I said again. And what do you mean “we”? Let’s go, Alba said then and picked up the plate of fruit. We really should stop getting bogged down in analysing everything. Let’s have some fun. That’s what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it? To try and have a bit of fun in this vale of tears.

Confused, I followed Alba back into the sitting room. Alba sat next to Ilich on the sofa. I sat there in silence, thinking about what Alba had said in the kitchen. I thought about how ridiculous it was of me to have stood in front of the mirror at home wondering if I wanted our friendship “to get deeper”, and a load of other drivel. Nothing is ever about what you think it will be. Nothing can ever be elevated to a purely theoretical, conceptual level. Everything is always and inexorably practical and shabby. Ilich chewed the melon and the juice ran down over his chin, which he wiped with the back of his hand. He chucked the rinds on the table and Alba picked them up and put them back on the plate. After a while they started kissing. Ilich’s hand was resting on Alba’s thigh. I got up and started to walk towards the hall. Thanks very much, I called. Hang on, Alba called after me. Don’t be in such a hurry. Come back, Ilich said. I came back and Alba made room for me on the sofa while she said in an affected voice that the night, like her, was still warm and expectant.

I have always thought that there are three things I love about my life: Encarnación in particular, and women and wood in general. I have no political convictions. I don’t give a damn about politics. People with political convictions frighten me. People who are willing to sacrifice themselves for an idea are also willing to sacrifice other people for the same idea. That applies to people who have been the victims of injustice as well. They are the most dangerous people of all because they believe themselves entitled to revenge. As for me I am totally spineless. I would never go to extremes for a point of view because there is nothing playful, sexual or pleasurable about points of view. That is what I have always thought: that I love three things in life and I don’t give a damn about the rest.

But the evening with Alba and Ilich made me re-evaluate my image of myself. Maybe I was coming apart at the seams; maybe I was beginning to have views. I didn’t like Ilich. Not his old revolutionary name, not his German appearance, not the sense of the rebel manqué he positively exuded. And I didn’t appreciate either the ménage à trois being arranged on the sofa. I found watching Alba in the arms of another man — and one she didn’t have any feelings for according to what she had just told me — disgusting. Seeing Ilich’s young and muscular body moving in harmony with Alba’s made me feel that I didn’t fit into the sexual constellation now forming before my eyes, and that in turn made me think about what sexual constellations I did fit into, and that what I was watching was a scene from some pathetic porn film I once saw by mistake when travelling across Spain on timber agency business and in which a very old man was being satisfied by two very young women. When I watched that film I was filled with a powerful sense of revulsion. It was a scene staged solely to earn money from the target group; no real young woman would prefer a man like that. The other possibility my sexual self envisaged at that moment was even more depressing: Encarnación and me naked in our marriage bed.

I put my hand on Alba’s breast, and Ilich said, Now then, Don Rodrigo, why don’t you undo that tie of yours and let’s have a good time.

After some time on the sofa, we went into Alba’s bedroom and continued. Ilich appeared not to be sober; at several points he started laughing, or even giggling, while Alba seemed to be parodying a porn star with cries and groans that were much too loud. As for me I managed to convince myself I shouldn’t think, just do. That might have worked if I hadn’t at one point looked up at the mirror that was stuck to the ceiling above Alba’s bed. The sight that met my eyes drained me of what little desire I had managed to conjure up so far. I could see Alba lying on top of Ilich and the muscles playing under her skin as they moved together. Ilich’s powerful arms were embracing her. I was at the bottom of the bed next to their entangled legs. Compared with their bodies, mine looked like a plant that had been through a period of severe drought. My shoulders were the colour of ivory; my collar bone was very pronounced and surrounded by dark shadows; my sex appeared to be some kind of growth, or a bolt, and my hands looked helpless as though they had no idea how to behave in order to become part of the situation beside them. But the worst thing of all was my face. With my mouth half-open and lips that were far too narrow, a searching gaze and my hair plastered to my scalp, I looked like a martyr in a war scene who has turned his face up to heaven to ask God for help. Good Lord, is that me, I had time to think before I heard a giggle from Alba and Ilich, who were also looking upwards. Someone’s got to go, Ilich said and grinned while he stroked Alba across her back. Don Rodrigo, Alba giggled. She laughed so hard I could see her gums. Then I looked up again and broke out in a cold sweat. How are you feeling? Ilich said and sat up on the bed. You’re sweating like a swamp. Nothing’s wrong, I said.

I went to the toilet, had a shower and got dressed. While Alba and Ilich lay there chatting, I sat in the sitting room. I lit a cigarette and looked out the window. Pla del Born was down there, and the cafes had put out tables and chairs. A bird sitting on the guttering in front of me dipped its head and had a quick drink; it then looked watchfully at me on the other side of the window. It was beginning to get light. Alba went into the kitchen and there was the sound of dishes being clattered. The coffee-maker hissed and the aroma spread throughout the flat. Shortly afterward she came out with a tray that she put on the table. One cup for you, she said to me, one for me and one for Ilich. Ilich, she called. Ilich came in and sat on the sofa and drank the coffee. Alba asked what we were going to do today. Ilich said he wanted to do something different. I laughed out loud.

“Something different? Isn’t that what we were doing all night?”

The moment I uttered the words I could hear how desperately ancient I must sound in their ears.

“How old are you?” Ilich asked, bringing the cup to his lips.

“Fifty-three,” I replied.

“So it’s too late then,” Ilich said.

“For what?” I asked.

“To off yourself,” Ilich answered.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean that all the brightest people kill themselves when they reach fifty — at the very latest,” Ilich said. “Because it’s all over after fifty; after that it’s all about trying to hold on to what you’ve got.”

“Hold on in what sense?”

“To the territory you’ve managed to piss out for yourself, I suppose,” he said.

He told us of a man he had heard about who spent his whole life researching the work of an author who had inspired him in his youth. The man had written articles, essays and dissertations about the writer, and his deepest wish was that all the people who came across the author’s work would associate the writer with himself.

“A bit vain it has to be said,” Ilich said, “but that’s what makes a lot of people tick.”

Then one day the academic in question discovered a flaw. He had been granted access — because of the research he was doing — to an archive containing writings the author had left as his legacy, and he would be the first person to explore the archive before it was opened up to the general public. What the man discovered there turned his blood to ice. In one letter the highly respected author expressed a range of socially unacceptable opinions. As though he were having an intimate conversation with himself, or confessing his true self in a poem, he gave vent to the anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic views he couldn’t express openly but which he felt had nourished him throughout his life, filling him with the hatred that could provide him with the vital energy he required to get out of bed, begin his day and start work.

“The necessary enemies,” Ilich said, nodding to himself. “The ones we need to carry on living, so we can go on believing that one day we are going to blow those bastards out of the water and put a pistol to their temples.”

“What are you saying?” Alba said, looking scared.

“In any case,” Ilich said, without paying Alba any mind, “the academic smuggled out the notes in his briefcase. He went home, shaking and in a cold sweat. He made a fire in the open grate and burnt the sheets of paper. And so began a new era in his life, because from the moment he read those lines the author had written, all his energy and all his efforts were devoted to concealing what he had previously dedicated his life to discovering. Just as his own image was supposed to be elevated by that of the author, it would have fallen apart if people discovered he had spent his whole life on the work of a Nazi, a racist and a misogynist. Some nights he tried to calm himself with the idea he had burnt the only proof and on others he just lay awake afraid there could be other evidence. He was dragged down by the curse.”

Ilich grinned.

“The curse of turning fifty. The people who fail to off themselves before they reach fifty can never manage it after that. I could give you other examples.”

He went on tell me about a Catalan poet who decided when he was thirty that he would kill himself when he got to fifty. No one believed him then but when he reached fifty he proved them wrong and took his own life, all calm and collected and without any fuss. His friends were astonished by how diabolically stubborn he had proved, but they admired him as well. When they subsequently turned sixty and seventy, and even older, and were transformed into vegetables slurping porridge in homes whose walls were painted the same colour as the insides of a fly, many of them would think: suppose I had done what the poet did? But by then it was too late.

“If you hesitate, you’re lost,” Ilich said.

“I have to go now,” I said and got up.

The palms of my hands were damp and I was feeling dizzy.

“I’ll give you a call,” Ilich said to my back.

“Why would you ring me?”

I turned round.

“So we can be timber pals,” Ilich replied.

“We’re not going to be timber pals,” I said.

“Aren’t we?” Ilich said. “Check this out then.”

He came over to me, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Alba sitting stiff as a post on the sofa. He held up his mobile phone.

“That’s you, Alba and me,” he said.

He stood beside me and pointed at the mobile’s screen. On it I could see myself on top of Alba’s body with her feet around my shoulders.

“What the hell?” I said.

Ilich slapped the mobile shut.

“So I’ll be ringing you,” he said.

“Give me that,” I said. “That’s illegal for Christ’s sake.”

“All’s fair …” Ilich said. “Although really, all I need is the one job. If you can help me with that, mum’s the word. Then I’ll keep this little love token to myself.”

I walked home to Encarnación. She was sitting in the same spot as when I left. Once again she was on the terrace solving crossword puzzles, and the woman was cleaning in the flat in the building opposite. A wind had risen off the sea, bringing with it a smell that had to be oil and tar from the harbour. She didn’t ask me where I had been and, remembering what she had said the evening before about not running a kennel, I didn’t come up with an explanation off the top of my head either. I sat next to her and helped with the crossword. After a while I went into the kitchen and made lunch. We ate and then we returned to the crossword. Alba rang in the afternoon. I could hear from her voice that she was jumpy. What have I got you mixed up in? she kept saying. He’s a criminal, through and through. It’s fine, I kept saying, to calm her down. We’ll fix it. I’ll sort out a timber contact for Ilich and then you break things off with him. It’ll all work out. Ilich isn’t someone to mess with, Alba said. I’ve had to deal with worse, I replied. You’ve got to be careful, Alba said. Yes, yes, I said, it’ll be all right. We just need to keep our cool. It’ll all turn out fine in the end. I’ll give him the number of a chair factory in Albacete, I said. A little shed out in the wilds of La Mancha. I laughed. He can spread his nets there. It’ll have to be the real deal, Alba said. You’ve got to come up with someone with real power. Ilich isn’t the kind of person you mess with. Why don’t you ring Del Pozo? My ears pricked up. Del Pozo? I’d heard about him through Alba, after all, and over time Del Pozo had become my most important customer, and in fact my only regular: his orders rolled in on a monthly basis and he was the only one I could continue to rely on while the others came and went. But asking for favours was risky in this business. I hadn’t cracked all the codes yet despite several years as a timber agent but even so I knew that even a single conversation could prove disastrous if not handled correctly. Bringing along a tyro like Ilich to see Del Pozo … he might very well consider that an insult. The idea of having to get in touch with Del Pozo about all this brought my palms out in a cold sweat again. I replied that Del Pozo wasn’t someone you just turned up to see. He was the spider at the centre of the web. All the threads ran through his hands. I don’t think we’ve got any choice, Alba said. I’ll see what I can do, I replied. We hung up.

Over the next few days I tried to persuade myself that I had been too easily intimidated by Ilich. And that he was the kind of person who was always spreading his nets among the people around him just to see what he might catch. An opportunist, pure and simple. But the thought of that bloody film gave me diarrhoea in the mornings. I looked up my name on the internet almost daily and heaved a sigh of relief when there was no sign of the film. I realised though that all this madness had to be brought to an end and that if I did help Ilich get a meeting with Del Pozo, a resolution of some kind might be possible.

In the end I rang Del Pozo. I began by asking after his wife Dolores, and Pozo replied that she had a liver disease that was turning her skin yellow and they were eating unsalted vegetable purée every night. And how is your daughter Nieves? I asked then. I don’t see anything of her, Del Pozo said. She’s gone and got a boyfriend, so I don’t see anything of her any more. He went on talking about his wife’s liver disease and seemed to have no interest in whatever my errand might be. I kept listening, because I knew that’s what you had to do with Del Pozo: being forced to listen to his drivel for half an hour before you got to say why you were ringing was a way for him to show who was in charge. All you could do was accept it for what it was; you had to just accept it, you always have to accept the structures of power. After twenty minutes of chatting about liver disease, he said he was sorry but he couldn’t talk any more, he had a meeting to attend. I got in quickly that I had a matter to discuss. It’s about a friend of mine, he needs a job. I see, said Del Pozo. You can come on Friday, the two of you, he said then. I can see you on Friday morning. I said thank you and we hung up.

I was at pains to point out to Ilich how incredibly lucky he was that Del Pozo had agreed to meet him. We drove in my car. He sat in the passenger seat with the window open. I asked him to close the window on account of the air conditioning. Ilich pretended not to hear and hot air continued pouring into the car. What a great time we had the other evening, he said after a while. I looked at him and he waved his mobile with a smile on his lips. We said not another word to each other for the rest of the entire journey. We stopped at a motorway restaurant and both had a sausage with chips. When we drove into Caudal de la Ribera, Ilich said that the cemetery was twice as large as the village. More dead people than live ones here, he said, grinning again. When we passed El Sultan de Oro, he said: Have you had a fuck at that club?

“No,” I lied.

Though I had, very definitely, had a fuck at that club. I couldn’t stop myself; I had pulled up outside one day out of sheer curiosity while driving to Del Pozo’s. As I entered I could smell the stagnant air, see the worn red sofas, the tables that hadn’t been wiped clean. I was about to turn round in the doorway but Encarnación and I hadn’t had sex in ages. I stood there, and the place reeked of smoke and bodies. A woman came towards me with open arms. She wore a broad smile in which I glimpsed a row of ochre-coloured teeth. Come in, she said. She took my hand and led me over to the register which lay open on the counter in reception. I’ve just come to sleep, I said. Once again her red-painted mouth formed a huge smile. Of course, she said. Everyone does.

We parked on the courtyard in front of Del Pozo’s office. It smelled of resin and gravel as we got out of the car. The heat buffeted us. Ilich said, An industry in the hinterland — what a fucking nightmare. Yes, I said. Absolute shade or absolute light. There are no grey zones here. Ilich spat on the ground and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. I don’t understand how a dump like this can have the kind of incredible turnover you said, he said. It’s just a fucking shed. Don’t judge a book by its cover, I said. So where’s the bloody book then? he retorted. It’s just a saying, I said, and he grinned.

I rang the bell, and we were welcomed by a secretary who put us in an extremely chilly waiting room. The sweat turned cold beneath our shirts, and Ilich shivered. After a few minutes the secretary came in to announce that Del Pozo would see us. We went up a flight of stairs and in through the door the secretary held open with a smile. Would you like some coffee? she asked. No thanks, we said.

“Come in, come in,” said a voice from the other side of the room.

The room that stretched out before us was the largest office on the entire Spanish altiplano, and maybe in all of Spain. The flooring was parqueted in a tropical redwood and the walls were covered with panels in very select timber. Above the panelling hung portrait paintings that recalled those you see when you visit the castles or estates of noble families, although these had been badly painted and the frames were much too garish. It was obvious that the individuals portrayed were related to the man now facing us, seated behind an enormous desk on the other side of the room. He was short of stature, thick-necked, and had a rectangular head with drooping, flabby skin. He had no hair at all and was wearing rimless spectacles with thick lenses.

“Rodrigo Auscias,” he said with a drawl. “It’s been a while.”

I went over and took his outstretched hand. I clasped it, and it was spongy and cold. I asked after his wife and her liver disease.

“Those vegetable purées will be the death of me,” Del Pozo said in his nasal drawl. “I’ve always loathed vegetables.”

He talked about his wife’s illness for a bit. Then he told me that his daughter Nieves had met a guy from Madrid. So he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her recently. Suddenly he stopped talking; he fixed his eyes on Ilich while folding his hands across his stomach and said:

“And this would be …?”

I explained what brought me here. I told him that Ilich was a family friend and he had been trying to get into the timber trade, but was on the point of giving up because the task seemed overwhelming.

“Well,” Del Pozo said and laughed slowly. “Those of us holding the reins are an old fraternity, and nothing is going to change while we’re still around. Nothing has changed as long as any of us have been alive.”

He made a gesture towards the faces in the paintings behind him.

“On the other hand,” he continued and raised a finger in the air, “it is time to start considering what the market of tomorrow will be like.”

He nodded slowly while talking and paused.

“The market of tomorrow?” I asked.

“That’s right. Tomorrow. Either we give in to Europe’s demand for transparency or we continue in the same vein. And if you ask me (he held up his hands as though in apology) I would prefer us to continue doing things the way we always have done.”

“Europe, Europe, Europe,” Ilich said. “It’s always Europe. What about Spain?”

Del Pozo nodded.

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what I’ve always wondered. What about Spain? We’re just expected to follow them around, like monkeys in a circus. Only Europe’s not worth it. There are quite a few things I would prefer not to have introduced here.”

“Right,” said Ilich. “They’ve got higher taxes.”

“Oh, the tax doesn’t make any difference, I don’t give a damn about taxes, I’ve never paid any. No, I’m thinking about other things. More important things. The balance of power, for instance.”

“Okay?” Ilich said sounding interested.

“Women have already started climbing the ladder in Europe.”

“Climbing the ladder in what way?” asked Ilich.

“I’m not sure exactly. But my contacts up there are saying we need to hold on to our trousers. Hold on to your trousers, they tell me. Hold on to your trousers, whatever you do.”

Ilich laughed aloud and said:

“Wanting things to remain the same is all part of belonging to the old guard. Only I don’t think there’s any point in holding on to our pants.”

Ilich laughed again and looked at me as though asking for confirmation.

“One thing I can tell you,” Del Pozo said and leant over the desk. “And this might be useful for you to know as you’re still young and unspoilt but you’re going to be stuck with it soon enough. Women are never satisfied. No matter how much you give them, they always want more. If you give them a car, they want a different one. If you pay them a compliment, then it was the wrong one. If you give them a vegetable purée, it will have the wrong vegetables in. Nothing is good enough for a real woman — that’s the very definition of what a real woman is: nothing is good enough and she is never satisfied, because she always deserves something better. There’s a rope around our necks and a knife is being pressed even harder to our throats. And that’s why I’ll tell you again: make sure you hold on to your trousers, otherwise you’ll be for it and your entire generation along with you. Don’t let them take your manhood away, because they still won’t want you once they’ve taken it. They’ll throw you in the wastepaper basket, like a spent cartridge, depleted capital, a used condom.”

Ilich opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but closed it again, put his arms over his chest and leant back in the chair. There was total silence. The door opened and in came the secretary holding a tray of coffee cups. I thought it wisest not to repeat that I didn’t want any, and accepted the cup, brought it to my lips and drank. The coffee was hot and bitter.

“Although it wasn’t women we were going to talk about,” I said, “but timber.”

“Then there’s this business with the cities as well,” Del Pozo said. “People who live in cities haven’t got the faintest idea about timber.”

Ilich nodded reflectively while he sipped his coffee. “You’re better off listening to someone in the know,” he said. “The people with experience.”

“The cobbler should stick to his last,” Del Pozo said.

“Each to his own,” Ilich agreed.

Ilich told us about his grandfather who was a Communist and had been executed during the Civil War. His grandfather had lived in Ciudad Real and worked at a little factory that made bedsteads. It was owing to his grandfather that Ilich had decided to focus his efforts on the timber trade.

“I’ve got it in my blood,” he said. “Trust me, I have.”

Del Pozo nodded. Then he said that as for the Left in the war, the Right had never been needed to beat them. They did a fine job of killing themselves on their own. Ilich made no reply to that comment but repeated that as far as the timber trade was concerned he had it in his blood. Del Pozo stared at him for a bit. Then his face split in a smile and he looked like a rat suddenly and unexpectedly baring all its teeth. Then he turned serious again and looked at the clock.

“This is what we’ll do,” he said getting up. “In about an hour I’ve got a meeting at which I’m supposed to try to sell a load of mould-damaged planks to a furniture manufacturer. You’ll tag along, and Ilich will be in charge of the negotiations. If you pull it off, you can work for me. If you can’t you’ll drive back home and you will never call again asking for another chance. Okay?”

“Shouldn’t I know a bit about what I’m supposed to be selling?” Ilich asked.

“All you need to know is this: the main thing is to get their attention. Don’t let them tell you that this or that person will deal with you, oh no, you have to talk to the person who owns the place. If it’s Maderas Benicio, there’s no point in talking to Gonzalo. If it’s Maderas Hernandez, don’t bother talking to Rubinetta with a mop in one hand and a duster in the other.”

Ilich laughed aloud.

“You may think I’m joking,” Del Pozo said. “But it’s like anything else. Nothing is ever complicated for someone with a bit of intuition. All you need is to be confident and capable of feeling your way along the walls of a darkened room. Everything is always incredibly simple, much simpler than you think.”

Del Pozo scratched his bare scalp.

“A darkened room is exactly the same as a lit room,” he went on with a pompous expression on his face. “It’s just that the light has been turned off. Never have any doubt about that, and when you’re selling timber never have any doubt in yourself, for God’s sake. People in general, and timber buyers in particular, can sniff out the first whiff of doubt like dogs, and that’s when they attack.”

“Okay,” Ilich said. “That I can do. I’m good at handling animals.”

“What a great guy,” Ilich said when we were back out on the car park. “Nowhere near as constipated as Alba said you said he was.”

I didn’t reply. I started the car and then we drove behind Del Pozo’s BMW through Caudal de la Ribera, which was completely empty at that time of day. The streets looked abandoned.

Afterwards they told me how they had handled the buyers. Del Pozo half a yard behind and Ilich in front. The buyers had listened for a good while. They had leant back in their seats like police detectives, inspecting Ilich, amused at first but then with more seriousness. Ilich had kept talking about new strategies.

“We are going to reshape the market. We’re going to remove all the middlemen and only Del Pozo will remain. We will be the only player and we will guarantee to sell on low commission. We’ll even be taking only three per cent instead of our usual fifteen on our very next delivery.”

The boss and his son looked at him with raised eyebrows. They nodded and exchanged glances.

“Feel free,” Ilich said at the end. “Please take a good look at the samples.”

They lifted up the samples he had put out. They inspected them from various angles and ran their fingers over them. The boss had the knack of an old hand and seemed to experience an almost sensual pleasure when he touched the raw material. For a moment it was as though something shone out of his face, like a ray of sunlight or the light from a lamp. The little factory was humming along around them as usual, you could hear the workers shouting to one another and there was the smell of glue in the air.

Their pens were busy scratching away. They excused themselves for a moment, left the room and went into another right next door. They consulted while Ilich and Del Pozo watched them through a large pane of glass. Three wretched per cent, three wretched per cent, what’s there to consult about? Del Pozo whispered and leant back. Ilich crossed one leg over the other. He looked out the window at where Del Pozo’s car was standing. You had to have signed a lot of successful contracts to have a car like that.

That was when inspiration struck. He had no idea why, because on the surface at least there was no obvious reason not to let everything proceed as usual. Maybe he was just in that lit room where someone had turned off the light, maybe he was just feeling his way along by his fingertips with unusual success. But he stood up, smoothed out the creases in his trousers and walked over to the pane of glass. He raised his hand and knocked carefully on the glass.

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

The faces of the buyers turned towards him. The sweat was shining on their foreheads and the boss had a cigarette in his hand.

“If I could just say one thing?”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind coming out of there then?”

They came out, dragging their feet and looking at him suspiciously.

“The sales process, and also the process of buying, can actually be reduced to a single sentence,” he said. “And I am now going to say it.”

“What is it?”

They were listening. It seemed as though the workers had gone on a break because there was suddenly total silence throughout the factory.

“Do you like the wood, or do you not like the wood?”

While uttering the question, he kept looking them straight in the eye. As though they were actually talking about a war. About the towns on a map to be obliterated, or spared. Destroy or save? It’s all in our hands now, and it’s of the utmost importance. We have the power; we are the people making the decision here. You, and me as well. Do you like the wood, or do you not like the wood?

He repeated the question. And added.

“I haven’t got all day.”

There are times when you manage to apply the exact amount of force required to get what you want. That might sound simple and straightforward but it involves a very precise balancing act between the force applied and the method employed. If he could close this deal, his life would take a new turn. He would become someone else. But the silence was so dense it was almost humming. A fluorescent tube in the ceiling was blinking irritatingly. There was a feeling that something fateful was about to occur and there was no escaping it. He started packing up the samples.

“We accept the offer,” they said then.

He’s a natural, no two ways about it, was Del Pozo’s only comment when they came out of the factory. Del Pozo was very, very pleased. He put his arm around Ilich and announced we were going to La Tortuga Feliz to have a slap-up dinner. Once we had got there, Del Pozo took out his white- and red-gold biro and had Ilich sign a contract. So where did you find this complete natural? Del Pozo asked me, and I felt there was a new coldness to his voice.

They talked about how they were going to work together. I sat on the other side of them in silence, eating the crema fría of courgettes set before me. I also ate some tapas that consisted of asparagus spears wrapped in ham. I thought the ham had a faint hint of dog and soon pushed it away. We’ll have to get you out to Caudal de la Ribera now and then, Del Pozo said to Ilich. Every other week here, and every other week at your place in Barcelona. Have you got a girlfriend? Yes, Ilich answered. I’ve got a girlfriend who comes from this village. Is that right? Del Pozo said. Who’s that then? Alba Cambó, Ilich replied, sounding rather proud. Oh, so that’s how you know one another, Del Pozo said nodding. That little lass. Right. I remember her all right. Her father had seven thousand sheep; her mother went mad. One day she just up and vanished. Got on the bus and disappeared, she’s never been seen since.

He ate a spoonful of the cold courgette cream and took a bite of the ham-wrapped asparagus. Anyway, Ilich. Don’t bring Alba Cambó down here; she never liked this place and it didn’t like her either. You can’t be a prophet in your home town, Ilich said with a shrug of his shoulders. Your home town knows who you are, Del Pozo replied. Your home town knows the grain of your timber; there’s no pulling the wool over its eyes. But don’t you worry, Ilich, we’ve got a place here that is going to make sure you won’t be missing Alba Cambó or any other girlfriend for that matter. He laughed aloud. El Sultan de Oro? I wondered. The food rose in my gorge straightaway. I told them I wasn’t feeling well, and that I needed to lie down. The car’s the best spot for that, Del Pozo said. It’s the only place that’s cool.

I went out and sat in the car. I couldn’t sleep but I folded the back seat down and lay flat. I closed my eyes but all I could see was that bloody club. The drapes, the greasy tables, the red sofas and a little man who walked round bare-chested with a floral spray and a rag in his hand. I disinfect everything here twice a day, he said, turning towards me. It smells of bodies is what I was thinking. Body fluids? the man asked. Body fluids are like salt. Too little and you don’t taste it, too much makes it inedible. Just what are you saying? I asked. He grinned and repeated that he disinfected everything twice a day and that the people who came here were genuine couples who really did talk to each other and that everything here was clean and proper. He sprayed a mist of fluid into the room and the drops fell in a fine, slow rain onto the carpet. I shook my head. Maybe I had got a touch of sunstroke. Voices kept finding their way into my head. I tried to fend them off but it was as if they left behind a lingering echo. I tried ringing Encarnación but she wasn’t answering. I could see her sitting at the round table on the terrace solving her crossword puzzles with the bird looking at her while the mobile phone on the table kept ringing.

I remembered that Alba had given me an issue of Semejanzas that had one of her stories in it. I had rolled it up and stuffed it in the glove compartment. So I got it out and read it while I was waiting for Ilich and Del Pozo to finish eating their meal. The story was about a young girl in Caudal who fell in love with the village priest. The piece ended with the priest, who had been accused of paedophilia, being burnt to death in the village church. I felt sick the whole time I was reading it. Then I opened the car door and got out. The heat had died down and there was a coolness to the air. I looked back towards the village, trying to see if anyone was about but everything looked empty and abandoned even though it was nine in the evening and people should have been outside eating dinner or just sitting at a bar. The church looked a bit smug where it stood in the village square. As if it were saying, here I am, still standing despite it all. I thought about Cambó’s story. My shirt was sticking to my back and I chided myself for not having brought another to change into. A timber agent’s rule number one: always have a change of clothes with you, you never know what might happen and if you suddenly find yourself in La Mancha, all you can do is deal with it. How long were they going to stay in there? How much could they have to talk about? A consignment of mould-damaged planks and a successful transaction. Just how much could there possibly be to say about that? I tried to ring Encarnación again. Then I dialled Alba’s number. She picked up, and I felt relieved at the sound of her voice, at hearing a human voice in the midst of all that silence. I told her how things had worked out with Del Pozo and Ilich. I went into great detail; I may even have exaggerated my own contribution. I wanted to make her happy; I wanted to get her to say that everything was all right now and that my job was done, just so I could savour that feeling.

“Brilliant,” Alba said. “That’s brilliant. Ilich will be pleased and grateful. So now we’ve done our bit, you and me. He’s got a foot in the door and that was the deal. He’ll have to leave us alone now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I just want to get all this over with now. I’ve got a marriage to save at home and a company I’ve got to get back on its feet.”

“Sure,” Alba said. “We’ve all got things we have to get sorted. I’m not really all that well actually.”

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

There was silence on the other end.

“It’s not something I’ll be asking you to help me with,” she said. “This time no one can help me.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “So this is a rogue of a different order then?”

She pretended to ignore the dig.

“You’ve done enough,” was all she said. “Just see that Ilich gets home okay, save your marriage and your company, and everything will be all right again. We could go back to the way we were before. Having coffee now and then, we could get together just like we used to?”

I could picture the way it used to be. That all seemed remote and impossible.

I fell asleep in the car and woke up several times with the evening sun in my face; even semi-comatose, I could feel how the skin was stretched and burnt across it. I slipped back into sleep and dreamed brief, uneasy dreams. In one of them I was walking behind Ilich and Del Pozo along the endless corridors of the timber yard. Del Pozo was talking about the different qualities of timber, gesticulating all over the place and walking over to the planks and profiles every now and then to run his hand over them, spellbound and silent, the way a horse trainer runs his hand over a particularly beautiful stallion or the way a goldsmith can suddenly feel a violent desire for his own material. Ilich seemed fascinated as well; he was standing beside Del Pozo with a wry smile and he, too, was drawing his fingers over some of the wood profiles, looking as though it made him shiver with pleasure. That’s the kind of person who should be dealing in wood, I thought in my dream. People who can feel it in their fingertips. Who can fall in love with a lifeless plank of timber, who would die for a cubic metre of soft Brazilian rosewood. Around us hung paintings of Del Pozo’s ancestors. They were staring at us from the walls like great apes, superior and reserved. I just don’t have a vocation for this, I thought. It’s not me. I have to get out of here. At one point Del Pozo looked over his shoulder to check that I was with them and that was when I caught sight of the lobe of his ear. It was narrow, creased and orange-coloured. It looked flabby and loose. As though in a trance I moved closer, put my hand on Del Pozo’s shoulder and bit his earlobe. The flesh was tender and sweet on my tongue. What am I doing? I thought in my dream. Have I lost my mind? Then Del Pozo turned his face towards me and without paying any attention to the bitten-off lobe that was now in my mouth he smiled at me, gently and slowly, almost kindly.

The night continued with one fevered dream succeeding another. The next one was about women’s bodies and feathers. The women were white, large and smooth, walking across a beach in front of me. I stared at their powerful legs, at the fat and the muscle tensing under their skin, and I felt a sudden desire. But just as I started to sense the heat rising in my loins, the women’s bodies changed shape. They still came walking along but the ones that now appeared on the beach had no backs. Some of them appeared to have been chopped off in the lumbar region, others were more like stalagmites: they finished above the hips in what looked like a little curl. Hello! I called in my dream. Hello. No one answered. You could thread them on a pole, I thought in spite of myself, as though they were hangers. I pictured it in my mind for perhaps a tenth of a second: a pole hung with white meaty women’s bodies that ended in little hooks that slipped around the clothes rail. Even though the vision was grotesque I laughed out loud. The women were hanging in a line right before my eyes. I could go up to them, reach out my hand, and skim through them the way you browse among clothes in a shop, looking for something in my own size. I tried to end that thought in the dream. But the idea was so grossly comical, it refused to be shut down. Stop thinking that women’s bodies can be suspended like hangers, I thought to myself. Although I continued to peruse the bodies. My size, I thought while my fingers worked through rows of powerful women’s backs. My size. There was a sudden smell of apricots. A woman was coming towards me from the interior of the shop with a large basket of warm, steaming apricots. Help yourself, she said smiling at me. I tried to make out her teeth but could only see darkness. I was just about to reach out for an apricot when I realised that they weren’t apricots in the basket but women’s ears. Hot, steamed women’s ears. Some still had earrings in, while on others they appeared to have been ripped off. I screamed. The smell of apricots? Ears? No, it wasn’t anything like that — it was, what it was was … skin. Sweet, warm, sweat-scented skin … Good Christ, I really am losing it, I thought, as I woke up.

It was Ilich’s smell. I woke up, sat upright and moved my tongue around my mouth, coated as it was from thirst like a rough and sticky carpet. Ilich thudded down into the seat beside me, smelling of smoke and alcohol. His face was flushed.

“So here you are having a howl all on your own,” he said.

“I was dreaming about … this horde of women’s bodies that … ”

He wasn’t listening. He folded the seat back and undid the top button of his trousers.

“Been checking out the porn, have you?” he said and picked up the issue of Semejanzas that was lying on the dashboard. “You old goat.”

“There’s a short story by Alba inside. Why don’t you read it while I grab some fresh air?”

A half hour or so later and we were on our way out of Caudal. Ilich had read the story in Semejanzas and said, “That’s my girl, torch the fucking bastard, she’s got her head screwed on alright, no coddling, just set fire to them.”

“Haven’t you got anything else for me to read?” he said then. “I have to admit I didn’t entirely dislike the experience. It gives you this feeling of being cultivated, if I can put it like that.”

I sighed while Ilich opened the glove box and had a rummage inside it.

“I think I’ve found something,” he said and took out a book.

I glanced at the cover. It was Houellebecq’s Platform.

“Ilich,” I said. “Trust me, that book is not right for a beginner.”

“I think I can decide for myself if something is right for me or not, Don Rodrigo.”

He turned the pages at random for a bit. Then he stopped at one of them and started reading. He laughed out loud.

“Is this really the kind of book you read when you’re on your own?”

He laughed again. Then he said he couldn’t believe I read this kind of thing; and wasn’t that revealing, he said. He started reading out loud the passage where Houellebecq, or Houellebecq’s alter ego or Houellebecq’s narrator at least, jerks off while reading about half-naked mixed-race girls on a beach. The narrator ejaculates on the pages and then says never mind, I won’t be reading that particular book again anyway. Ilich shook his head and looked at me with an incredulous grin on his face. “Do you seriously believe that kind of thing leaves people any the wiser, Don Rodrigo?” I remembered the episode. It’s when the main character reads The Firm by John Grisham. Taken out of context it did sound rather pitiful, the way almost anything taken out of context does.

“It’s not a bad episode when you read it in context,” I said.

Ilich laughed again and struck the book against the dashboard.

“You’ve really gone and disappointed me now,” he said. “So this is what literature is all about? A bunch of wankers who stick pages together with their own sperm? Ha! It’s enough to make you weep.”

I didn’t have the energy to listen to him any more but stared instead at the road while I was thinking about timber. Cubic metres and letters of credit and containers. People who inspected planed surfaces with a critical eye. Ilich yawned and said we ought to maybe think about spending the night in Caudal. I had no desire to stay at El Sultan de Oro and there was little likelihood of there being anywhere else to sleep around here so I dismissed the whole idea and said I wasn’t tired at all and liked driving through the night, it gave me time to think.

“And you can sleep in the meanwhile,” I said.

“Yup,” he said. “That’s what I am going to do. Cos I’m tired as fuck and drunk as a skunk.”

His head drooped towards his shoulder and I thought for a moment he had fallen asleep. Then he stuck his thumb in the air.

“The whole thing went without a hitch. Thanks to you — it all went without a hitch. I owe you a huge fucking thank you, Don Rodrigo, a thank you as big as those bags hanging off Del Pozo’s chops.”

He laughed at his own phrase and belched loudly. A minute or so later and he was asleep.

I drove out of Caudal de la Ribera. The houses turned unnaturally white in the light of the headlamps; they whipped past us like vacant-eyed statues. As we drove out of the village I saw the club, which looked abandoned as well. Then we passed the church and I slowed down and inspected it more carefully. I was trying to make out whether the roof was new or if there were soot stains around the windows: anything to indicate there was an ounce of truth to Alba’s story. Only it was too dark and I couldn’t see anything. I felt a huge sense of relief when we finally left the village behind and drove out onto the main road.

I had the radio on for a while to stop myself falling asleep then I turned it off and drove in silence. We passed Cañaveruelas, Guadalajara, and continued on towards Zaragoza. There was almost no traffic on the road at that time of night, and the mountains of Aragon slipped past outside the car window: grey, mute and impregnable. I stopped at a lay-by for a while. I got out and sat on a bench. I just sat there with a cigarette in my hand, but it never occurred to me to light it. The moon had risen and was shining on the slopes of the mountains; their jagged edges cast grotesque shadows. Everything was utterly silent, and it all felt so dead. But the chill in the air was lovely and cool against the burnt skin of my face. I got out my mobile again and rang Encarnación’s number but there was still no answer. I lit the cigarette and smoked it slowly; I could feel myself winding down and recapturing a certain calm. My thoughts wandered freely, and for some reason I happened to think about a hamster that Encarnación and I had bought right after we met. Apart from Bret, the dog who came on the scene a bit later, the hamster had been the only creature we’d had in common. We must have seemed odd when we arrived at the pet shop to buy it. Normally the people who buy hamsters have got kids. They buy the hamster because the kid keeps nagging them to. I got the feeling the shop owner thought we wanted it to feed to a snake because he gave us a searching look when he took it out of the cage. I couldn’t be bothered denying anything, and we were given the hamster wrapped in a little yellow box with tiny balloons on. What are we going to call it? Encarnación asked on the way home in the car and I immediately thought we should give it a literary name like Orlando, Sancho or Julien Sorel. Then I thought that was ridiculous and suggested we call the hamster The Hamster. The first few weeks there was no smell from The Hamster. Then something happened. Presumably it became sexually mature and the acids in its urine were composed differently. After a few more months the urine had a strong smell. We cleaned out the cage every day and every morning the smell was back. He’s marking out his territory with his piss, Encarnación said. But the smell of rotten Chinese food hit us in the face every time we came in the door to the flat. It’s hard to believe the little bastard can make such a bloody stink, said Encarnación. One day she stepped on it. By mistake, she said. The Hamster had been out of the cage; she had forgotten she had let him out, and he had been scampering across the floor while she was carrying the laundry basket. By the time she felt that soft body being crushed under her foot, it was too late. The Hamster lay dead where she had stepped on it. I picked it up and the next day we drove out to Estrella del Mar where we planned to bury it. The whole thing felt pathetic. Encarnación kept repeating that it had been an accident, and I played along but I knew it had been no accident, because when we buried it and stood there in silence for a minute or two, we weren’t the slightest bit sad, not even melancholy. We walked beside each other along the beach, a little like the couple from Salou I had seen when I was a child. We said not a word about The Hamster but talked instead about where we would go, what we would drink, and what a lovely evening it was. We talked solely about ourselves. Then we had a drink and forgot about The Hamster. And we have never mentioned him since.

The episode with The Hamster hadn’t entirely robbed Encarnación of the desire to have a pet, however. It did cross my mind now and then that it might not really have been a pet she wanted when it came down to it, but a child. The animal would have been the first step, part of a gradual approach. I have always wanted a child myself (though not a pet) and I felt that if Encarnación’s desire were given a chance to grow in peace and quiet we might one day arrive at that long-awaited moment when she announced she had stopped taking her pills. She might have been wanting to assure herself that there was someone suited to being a father within me before she got down to business. It wouldn’t have been entirely unreasonable on her part to want to make sure. And so I was persuaded to accept the idea of having a dog. We were not very well off at that point and that was why I remembered the brothel (which I had only visited that one time), the one that had a kennel. I told Encarnación there was a kennel in Caudal and on my next visit to Del Pozo I could ask if they had a puppy to spare. Encarnación thought it was a good idea and said something as well about the genetic superiority of the fortunate cross-breed over the pedigreed animal. So the next time I drove to Caudal I stopped at the brothel again. I entered the place and found myself in the same musty room with the red sofas where I’d been the first time. The woman with the crescent-shaped mouth was once again at the register. Hello, she said. I see you’ve come back. That startled me a bit because it would have been several years since I visited them. I had no idea anyone would remember me, I said. It was so long ago after all. Wasn’t it — you saw? (At this point she said a woman’s name I no longer recall.) I can see she’s free now as well, she said then with a smile. Would you like to have her? I shook my head. No thanks, I said. I’m not here on that sort of errand this time. I’m looking for a dog. The woman looked quizzically at me. A dog? Yes, I’ve promised my wife a puppy. I was going to ask you if you had any you didn’t … need? The woman stared at me for several moments; then she shut the register with a bang. Of course we do, Mr Auscias. We’ve got everything you could ever want in this place. Girls, drinks, cold cuts, a sympathetic ear or a sofa to sit on. Even dogs. We’ve got it all. She walked straight-backed along the corridor, which was flanked by a row of rooms with numbers mounted on the doors. I walked behind her. I had been thinking of a bitch, I said. My wife would prefer a bitch. They’re said to be calmer and more receptive. That was when she came to a halt. We don’t have any bitches, she said. There are only women here, and no bitches.

She stood there in silence for a bit before she went on:

“The dogs are all male. Bitches are not something we provide.”

I wondered how they could have puppies when they didn’t have any bitches. But when she opened the door to the kennel I realised that any notion of puppies was wide of the mark. A bunch of shaggy curs were throwing themselves raucously against the fence. A few younger dogs were pacing rather nervously to and fro behind them. I remembered what the woman I’d spent the night with the first time I was here had told me. We’ve got a kennel and the dogs in it are all named after famous male writers, she had said. Whenever some guy pays us a visit and is nasty to us, we give the dogs rotten meat. I couldn’t help laughing at the whole idea at the time. Passive rebellion is what they call that, I informed her. When you’re powerless, passive rebellion is what you come up with. It’s also called projection. You make the dogs suffer for what the men have done to you because the dogs are weaker than you. It’s like a father who abuses his children because the factory owner has forced him to work too hard. It’s not a very nice thing to do. Pretty despicable really. That’s what you think, is it? she said. It’s just we’ve got to have somewhere to vent our anger too. Of course you do, I said and didn’t know what to say next. Only where did you get the idea from? I asked. We had a visit from this feminist once, she said then. An intellectual feminist from the city. She wore high heels and smelled chic. She had these long conversations with us, one on one to begin with, and then with all of us together. She said she wanted to help us, though the truth is she looked down on us. She talked about the power of language; she told us that language had been created by men and that we didn’t have a language of our own and if we were going to learn our own language, first we had to learn to talk theirs fluently. We just sat there listening to her. So tell me about yourselves, she said, and she used to look sternly at us over the rim of her glasses while she talked. I’m completely fucking appalled that you’re all so bloody ignorant about everything, she said in the end as she stuffed her fountain pen into its case. She had realised there was nothing to be done, not for us and not about the club or the men who visited it, and she was thinking she had been casting pearls before swine in coming here (though perhaps you’d have to say sows). We hadn’t turned out to be the kind of people who could serve as research material for her report, not by a long way. She furrowed her brow gloomily while she was collecting her papers and was about to set off home again. Only on the way out she caught sight of the kennel. What are the dogs called? she asked. They don’t have names, we said. They’re just called The Dogs. Alright then, she said. So let’s get something done here in any case. We can make a start with the little things. Even though you can’t leave this place and break free, we can start small and work with what we’ve got. Passive aggression — that’s the term for what we’re going to do now. We’re going to call this little pup Dante. Let’s call the mangy old cur over there Chaucer. The canary bird hanging on the wall is going to be known as Harold Bloom. She had a good laugh then and wrote out these little name tags she handed to us. Put them on their collars, she said, before jumping into her car with a chuckle and driving out onto the main road. She left us there with the bits of paper and the dogs. We didn’t like the idea at all to begin with. But all the same every time we got a new dog we tried to come up with the name of a male author. It turned into a way to entertain ourselves. Only we didn’t know the names of that many male authors. Not male ones or female ones for that matter. Anyway some of our clients are readers and they help us out from time to time.

The woman from reception was standing there with her hand raised towards the dogs.

“You can take that one,” she said pointing at a grey dog. “He’s called Bret. Bret Easton Ellis. Named after a book someone found one morning on the bedside table.”

I picked up Bret Easton Ellis, packed him into a box in the car and drove home to Encarnación. I honestly believe we have made a proper dog of him now, I was thinking as I sat there in the night.

I had finished smoking my cigarette. I chucked the stub on the ground and got back into the car.

We had passed Zaragoza when Ilich woke up. He had a stretch and then just sat there for a while looking out the window; he lit a cigarette and had a smoke and wasn’t bothered that I was coughing pointedly beside him.

“What a fucking dump,” he said.

“Which one?” I asked.

“Caudal de la Ribera,” Ilich said. “And what a fucking asshole that Del Pozo is.”

“I thought you liked each other,” I said.

“He wanted us to spend the night at that club. ‘The best club for swingers in the country’, he said. He said they were about to close and it was now or never. He talked about all the fine whores they had working there. The average age was like forty-eight but it was top-notch stuff.”

He laughed. I said nothing.

“It’s just I’ve been to quite a few clubs like that,” he went on to say. “They’re fucking revolting. All these men walking round with shaggy nipples and the women are so past their sell-by date it’s enough to make you cry.”

“So what were you doing at that kind of club, seeing as you find them so unpleasant?” I asked.

Ilich looked out the window. Then he told me about a film he had seen once about a man suffering from extreme starvation. He had been walking round the streets of some city, emaciated and all but unconscious, crawling along the walls like the living dead. Then he had come to a butcher’s. Give me a bit of meat, he had begged. I am starving. Just give me a bit of meat. The butcher had laughed at him, and so had everyone else in the butcher’s shop. In the end he had been given a bag. He had gone into an alleyway and opened it. The bag had scraps in it and a rancid smell was coming off them. It’s rotten, the man had time to think before hunger overwhelmed him. He started eating the meat, he couldn’t help gulping it down, feeling it move around his mouth and then down his gullet. He suppressed the waves of nausea, and ate more. The rotten meat made him feel like shit, Ilich said. It made him vomit. But he couldn’t stop eating it, that’s how hungry he was.

Ilich took off his shoes and put his feet up on the dashboard.

“Only you know what I think sometimes?” he asked. “The best fucks you ever have are the ones you have with yourself.”

“Okay?” I said.

“I mean you never get to fuck the way you can in your imagination.”

“Do you have to say fuck the whole time?” I said.

“What else am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know. Make love maybe. Or have sex.”

“That’s not the same,” Ilich said. “That’s not the same thing at all, Don Rodrigo. What I was trying to say is that the best fucks I’ve had are the ones I’ve had in my mind. There’s no smell of bodies, and everyone is perfect. You can fuck people’s wives in there and people’s waitresses, and if you want to you can fuck all the ones who are fucking other people’s wives and maids as well.”

“Is that something you usually do?” I said.

“What?”

“Fuck other men, in your imagination?”

“Yeah, that’s something I do,” said Ilich. “Do you want to try it out?”

“In fantasy?” I said.

“Or in real life?” Ilich said.

“Give it a rest, for Christ’s sake,” I said,

We drove on for a bit. Suddenly Ilich said:

“Sorry.”

“What?” I asked.

“I’m provoking you.”

All of a sudden I felt deadly tired.

“I’m not with you,” I said.

“Don’t play dumb,” Ilich said. “I’m trying to be unpleasant to you, to make the trip unpleasant for you. Only when I think about it, I can’t understand why, because I really only want to make you feel good. You’ve done more for me than anyone else has in a long time. You believed in me, you took me to see your contact in the timber industry and did your best to see that I got a job. You get kudos for that, because there’s no one else who’d do something like that for me.”

I cleared my throat.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but you did have a hold over me,” I said.

It wasn’t that I had any desire to diminish what I had done for Ilich, but it would have been pathetic to sit there and just pretend I had done what I had done out of some general feeling of charity or from a desire to come to the rescue of people like him. But Ilich took no notice.

“Fuck it, Rodrigo,” he said. “I really do want to make you feel good. I want to make you feel really fucking happy, Rodrigo. As thanks for being such a great old guy.”

“Old guy?” I said.

“Gentleman,” Ilich corrected himself and pinched my cheek. “As thanks for being such a stand-up older gentleman. I’ve just got to come up with something. Let me think about it.”

He looked out the window for a bit, and I thought that might be the right moment to suggest he erase the bloody film from his mobile. But my throat felt clogged and I didn’t dare say anything because even though I didn’t know Ilich that well I felt it was safe to conclude he was the kind of person who goes for the jugular at the first sign of uncertainty. You have to possess everything with some people. Walk down the street and think: I own all of this, you too, so keep your trap shut or you won’t know what hit you.

“I just thought of it!” Ilich exclaimed. “Now I know how to make you really fucking happy, Don Rodrigo.”

“Oh yes?” I said.

He moved to put his back against the window and looked at me with a broad smile across his face.

“Alba said you’re a literary person. You like reading, you run study groups for young people and you believe that people are improved by reading. It makes you happy when people read books. Doesn’t it?”

I squirmed.

“I don’t know about happy exactly,” I said. “It’s true though that I think it’s a good thing for young people to read good literature. It gets them to see a different side of things and … ”

“Exactly,” Ilich said. “You are an altruist, someone who cares about people and you want them to be happy and well-read and content. So I am going to read a book.”

He smiled as though he had said he was going to give me a million or a house on the beach.

“Ilich,” I began. “In all seriousness, I really couldn’t care less whether you … ”

“Say a book I should read,” he said. “You can choose it, Don Rodrigo. Only don’t pick one that’s too thick because I’ll never read it to the end if you do. And not one of those wanking books either like the one you’ve got in the glove compartment. A book that’s just the right thinness and one that’s really good. And I will read it for your sake, and I will read it slowly when everything is quiet around me so each word will sort of sink in and put forth lovely little buds in this ignorant head of mine.”

He laughed, pleased with his phrase. I did some thinking for a bit.

“The Old Man and the Sea,” I said then.

“The Old Man and the Sea,” Ilich repeated.

The old man and the sea, he said as though he had never heard the title before and needed to make an effort to commit it to memory. And then:

“The old man, that’s you, is it?”

We drove on through the darkness. I was thinking about Encarnación. Ilich took his socks off. He crumpled them into rags and rubbed them between his toes. Little flakes of skin rained down on the dashboard. I opened the window a smidgen to allow the chill night air to enter the car. The revulsion I had started feeling for Ilich, for all of him, was only adding fuel to the longing I was feeling for Encarnación. I could see her before me, remote and focused, the way she would be sitting there with her crossword. There was something beautiful about her detachment. It may not have been that easily perceived, not by a stranger in any case and not even by someone like me who had lived with her so closely for many years, because it was more as though she were simply being elusive and quiet when you first encountered it. But if you were where I was, driving through the Aragonese night with mountains on all sides and everything feeling so desolate and stark, and with someone like Ilich beside you, it was as though that image of Encarnación completely enclosed in her own world was the only clear and logical response to it all. The world wasn’t something you could be turned towards. You had to turn away from it. Sauve qui peut, as it were. There might be lots of wonderful things out there, you might want to bring up beauty, say; not to believe in beauty would be idiotic in the circumstances: all you had to do was look out the window from where I was sitting right this moment. It’s just that it ends up jumbled together; you can never separate out the different layers and that kind of beauty can never remain intact. The mountains could be where they are and you could be on a bench at night bathing in the moonlight with the smoke from your cigarette slowly dissipating in front of you. You might have a sense of being in balance with everything around you and you might feel that power that comes from solitude, silence and beauty, but you will still think of a hamster that smelled of rotting Chinese food and there will still be someone like Ilich in the car only a few metres away, someone who has barely even read a single book and who has a film on his mobile in which you are playing a porn star and who will soon be cleaning the spaces between his toes with a smelly sock. Everything is so undistilled that you can never get a proper grip around whatever the essence might be; it slips away from you and gets diluted with other fluids, like water, or urine. But not Encarnación. Not Encarnación. Just let me get home, I kept thinking. Home to Encarnación. I had to acknowledge she was right in her theories about humanity. Her pessimism was the only conceivable viewpoint. I might even be able to tell her about it. About everything that had happened, about Alba and Ilich. She would forgive me my infidelity if she understood that I regretted it. Did I regret it? Yes, I did. Nothing I had gained from it had been worth what I had sacrificed. What had I in fact sacrificed? A day with Ilich in Caudal? What else? Having the runs on a couple of mornings? Was that a sacrifice? Wasn’t that something you could offer up for someone else? For Alba? For Ilich? I felt slightly cheered by the thought. I’ve just got to finish this now, I thought. Put a full stop after the last letter and then lick the seal on the envelope. One last effort and it will all be over.

“Ilich,” I said. “Have you got a girlfriend?”

He looked at me in astonishment.

“Of course I have,” he said. “I’ve got Alba, haven’t I?”

“I see,” I said. “It’s just the two of you didn’t really strike me that way.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like a couple.”

“Well we are,” Ilich said. “We’re just taking a break. The sex between us is good. We’ll get together again.”

We sat in silence for a while.

“Ilich,” I said then. “Leave Alba alone.”

“What?” he asked.

“Just leave her be,” I said. “The fact that it has been good as you said doesn’t mean anything. Real love is quite different.”

“Oh, and that’s something you’re an expert on, is it, Don Rodrigo?” Ilich said contemptuously. “The man who goes in for threesomes while his wife stays at home and does the crossword. And who ends up in a film he has to get rid of so she won’t leave him if she ever sees it. Is that what you call real love?”

I felt incredibly tired but managed nevertheless to stay calm and say, “That’s right, the film, the one you were supposed to get rid of now that I’ve helped you.”

“Right, I will,” Ilich said and got his mobile out.

He was busy pushing buttons.

“That’s it. It’s gone,” he said then.

“Thanks.”

I didn’t have the energy to wonder if the film really was gone; I gave myself the benefit of simply trusting him.

“No, thank you,” Ilich said. “I can’t thank you enough. I’d never have got this chance without you. Sorry about having to use the film but I’d never have got anywhere without it.”

We looked at one another for a moment. I thought there was something in the way he was looking at me, something honest maybe.

“People don’t help someone like me, not unless you put them under a bit of pressure,” Ilich said.

“In any case I hope the pressure is off for good as far as I am concerned,” I said. “The whole thing has been making me feel pretty ill.”

Ilich laughed.

“So the whole thing has been making you feel pretty ill, has it? You’re fucking priceless, Don Rodrigo. The whole thing has been making you feel pretty ill. Good thing it’s over then, and you can go home to the little woman and to real love.”

Before we got to Barcelona I had told him again that he should let Alba alone, and Ilich said he would think about it, maybe she wasn’t his type in any case. I dropped him off in front of a large grey apartment building.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said as he got out of the car. “I’ll take you out for a beer to say thanks.”

“Not at all,” I said.

Ilich banged on the car with his hand, and then he got a key out of his pocket and went in the entrance.

“And I will read The Old Man and the Sea!” he yelled. “I’ll ring you afterwards and tell you what I think.”

I put the car in gear and drove home.

It was almost morning of the following day by the time I made my way into our hall. A soft dawn light was stealing into the flat. Everything was silent. I closed the door behind me, I put my briefcase on the floor and then I stood there in the hall and just savoured the feeling of being home. I looked at myself in the same mirror I had looked at myself in a few weeks earlier, before leaving for dinner at Alba Cambó’s. I had looked far too proper at the time and that image of myself had irritated me. The man I was seeing now looked entirely different. My hair was anything but neat and lay in damp, frayed wisps across the crown of my head and there was less of it, or so it seemed to me. I was white in the face. It looked like I had got thinner as well; my head seemed big in relation to my shoulders. My shirt was dirty; I was dirty all over. My trousers looked too long or badly hemmed and they were filthy too, as if everything had been coated in a film of dust from the road.

I took a look around the flat. Everything was as usual. Spotless and neat like no one had been living there since I left home. Encarnación’s little chair and table were on the terrace with a pile of newspapers and pencils. There was a scent of Encarnación in the flat, a blend of her skin and the perfume she usually wore. What perfume does she usually wear? I asked myself. I didn’t even know what perfume my own wife put on. I’ve got a long way to go, I thought. Might as well start now. Things go in cycles, you go down but then you come up again. You hit a thermal and the upwards motion is completely natural. I am just going to sleep. Just sleep. Then I will start afresh, and everything is going to be fine. I lay down beside Encarnación in the bed. She was lying with her back towards me and her breathing was calm and regular. I fell asleep with my arm around her and I felt the warmth of her back against my chest.

Over the next few months I forgot almost entirely about Ilich. I was in regular contact with Del Pozo, but Ilich was never mentioned. I didn’t hear from Alba either, and I presumed she was happy and didn’t need me for anything. As for Ilich, I assumed that was how people like him behaved. Their lives happen to them in waves; they mosey along as best they can, doing this for a bit, and then that for a while. They are not the kind of people who tackle things head-on, who eventually manage to really find a rhythm and a constancy in what they do.

Some of the rumours circulating among us timber agents were rather worrying. In terms of both the general state of the economy, which was on the downturn with cuts being made everywhere, and the pressures being exerted on the market by Europe, and by the Chinese. There was a long feature in the trade magazine on how to survive as an “intermediary” (a word I loathe: it deprives you of any justification for your existence), and how a stitch in time will help you grow stronger. The gist of the whole piece was you have to accelerate and slow down at the same time, to put your house in order and make sure you are protected by healthy finances and a good skill set, the usual platitudes you hear when money is tight and everyone’s trying to get by as best they can. Over the phone Del Pozo confided in me that he had plans to expand: he was developing strategies to “break the competition down into separate molecules”. I tried to get him to understand that my imports of ethically sourced timber were well placed to stave off the competition and that they provided added value, which was a positive factor in times like these. I thought everything I said sounded hollow, but I reiterated that my goods were transported on trucks fuelled by sunflower oil and that I only traded with countries that worked with the motto “a new tree is planted for every one felled”. I talked about the importance of standing out from the crowd and that this could be achieved by creating a strong ethical brand; in this way, the distribution chain in our land would appear “ethical” as well. Del Pozo sounded positive, he chuckled and said people like me really were really essential, and even though my goods were a tiny bit more expensive that was offset by the fact that when he bought from me he could sleep like a baby, a clear conscience was the best pillow you could have. He insisted that he flew the flag for my products whenever he got the chance — I was his environmental badge of honour. But no orders arrived. Normally one fax would rustle in every month from one of his secretaries, and these were often fairly large deliveries, several hundred cubic metres, frequently with a high reprocessing value as the countries in northern Europe have chains that can produce practically anything from bedsteads to carved chair legs and a whole load of other things you can sell at whatever DIY centre you choose. I rang him several times but it was the same old song on each occasion: I had all the cred in the trade anyone could want, and if I asked straight out why didn’t he put in an order in that case, he would reply that he had something on the go and that one of these days Milagros would be sending over a fax.

The feeling that Encarnación was the one pure and unsullied thing in my world persisted; it wasn’t transient and it wasn’t dulled by resting, eating, and spending time together, the way I expected it would be. Something still caught in my throat when I looked at her and I used to take my computer with me into the sitting room so I could watch her sitting on the terrace. For long periods I did no work at all but just sat there watching her; I know it sounds silly, but it was as if I was getting a proper look at exactly what I loved about my wife for the first time. She seemed so impregnable. Unattainable. Only how could she be unattainable, it would sometimes occur to me, she’s my wife after all. But even though she was always perfectly amiable towards me (we even made love to one another on a few occasions), I couldn’t help getting that impression of unattainability. She does love me, I had to repeat to myself sometimes. Of course she loves me, she definitely does, I can feel utterly calm about her love; everything is the way it’s supposed to be and all is well.

But despite the fact that we were physically close and despite the fact that after fifteen years of marriage my love had suddenly started to grow stronger than ever, the silence between us was growing as well. It was as if we had been distilling certain aspects of ourselves that were now becoming dominant — I became increasingly fixated on getting the business back on its feet, and she was slipping more and more inside herself. We spent our days in entirely different spheres as a result, which meant we found ourselves faced with a void whenever we tried to find things in common to talk about. There were suppers when we conversed only in monosyllables about entirely trivial matters. Something we had read in the paper, or heard on the radio, repetitions of an already repeated recycling of uninteresting news. Increasingly, Encarnación began to withdraw inside the flat as well. On some days she didn’t even open the terrace doors but stayed inside her bedroom, lying on a mattress, surrounded by a sea of ashtrays, cigarette packs, books, newspapers, records and dirty wine glasses. The wine glasses worried me and I always picked them up and took them out into the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher or I washed them up by hand and dried them and then put them back in the cupboard. I didn’t like the air of decay it lent the whole apartment when you got up on a Monday morning to see a half-empty bottle on the dining table and then a knocked-over glass beside Encarnación’s bed, stained with dark spots from the tannins and smeared with lipstick. Encarnación had always been a very tidy woman, but something was clearly changing.

And all that was just the beginning. Soon she was asking me not just to buy wine for dinner but stronger drinks as well, “to help pass the time”. I asked how things were going with her crosswords, and she just stared at me as though she had never solved a crossword puzzle in her life; then she said that that period was over. I talked to a friend about it. I told him about the onset of her drinking habit and how she had suddenly stopped doing the crosswords she had previously devoted almost all her spare time to, and he replied that that had to be a pretty positive development, didn’t it? What with Encarnación no longer staring at boxed-in letters like a pupa in its cocoon for days on end? Wasn’t she actually doing something different and showing signs of wanting to spread her wings and really start living? The same friend thought I was setting too much store by her drinking habit, in his view a few glasses every now and then couldn’t really hurt. Encarnación hasn’t had problems with drinking before, has she, she doesn’t seem like the type, he said. Have a glass along with her, and relax a bit, try and forget your business worries, he counselled me.

I remember one dreadful day right about that time. I was supposed to visit some potential customers in Lleida, and Encarnación was also going to be gone for the day to visit a girlfriend in Girona and needed a car. I was happy she was actually going to be doing something, getting out of the flat and out of the city, so I went off to hire a car for myself from the rental company so she could take ours. Encarnación left home a bit before me. I got myself ready, did a bit of tidying up in the flat and then went downstairs and got in the car I had rented. I started driving towards the motorway; the traffic was heavy at that time of morning and I had to stop at almost every traffic light. At one of them I thought I saw someone I knew out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head and saw that the person sitting in the car alongside me was sobbing. I was able to make out the heartbreaking shape of a person weeping floods of tears before I realised who it was. A woman is crying in the car alongside me was the thought that suddenly flickered across my brain. Then I grasped the incomprehensible: the woman in the car was Encarnación. She was crying so hard snot was running down her face, and I could see it hanging in a long strand from her upper lip down over her chin and towards her chest. Her face was crumpled in a spasm, squeezing out the tears. They ran across her face, which was pulpy and red. She had both hands on the upper part of the steering wheel and was resting her forehead against them as she sobbed. I had never seen her cry that way; I don’t think I had ever seen anyone cry like that. It felt as if the blood had stopped flowing through my veins. I managed to remain sufficiently cool-headed to put the car in gear when the light turned green, and then accelerate and drive off. I stopped in the next lay-by for buses. I sat there for a long time, trying to get myself under control. That evening I wanted to ask her why she had been crying in the car but I had no idea how to ask the question; coming across her in the midst of her pain felt like an intrusion. So I said nothing, but that image of her remains burnt into my brain and hurts as much now, talking about it, as it did then. The insight I would have needed to make at that moment was no doubt too huge and too painful for me to get anywhere near it. Because what Encarnación was making clear in the car was that she was deeply unhappy and maybe she wasn’t driving to see a girlfriend at all but could even have been on her way to kill herself. The idea didn’t occur to me then, only now when I look back and understand everything more clearly, her courage must have failed her. I get goosebumps whenever I think about that. It may have been out of some kind of crass instinct for self-preservation that I looked the other way, like someone standing on the edge of a cliff looking in the wrong direction, I just don’t know.

I tried to hold on to something. Instead of turning everything upside down I took her drinking habit with a pinch of salt and decided to join her (perhaps that episode of hers in the car had been the result of loneliness?). And slowly we established a new routine. When I stopped work each evening at seven, I went into the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of chilled white wine or cava, knocked on the door to her room and held out the glass to her and then she would look up and smile at me and her smile was entirely genuine. We sat on the sofa and under the influence of the alcohol we talked about the day that had passed, what we had done in our respective spheres, and all I can say is that we were happy then or at least that is how it felt. We talked and talked, about what we had said and written and who we had been working with and how things had gone in general, and all the while we kept drinking and feeling increasingly exhilarated. If we occasionally reminded ourselves that we had actually been drinking on the sofa for the fourth evening in a row, even if it was only a quiet and harmless tipple, we would immediately come up with the excuse that in our case all the alcohol did was serve as a dividing line between what was hard work and our own private world. We needed that gilded boundary in the shape of cava or a viscous Martini in order to feel we were entering a different realm. And after we had said that, we might stagger for a bit between the stove and the kitchen table and on to the fridge to get out the Martini bottle and then on to the freezer to get out more ice and pour in more Martini.

Eventually I found it difficult to wake up in the mornings, so I scaled back my consumption, and you can’t turn up at clients with your breath smelling of old dog, but Encarnación kept at it. Once I had got out of the habit of drinking, or was at least drinking more moderately than we had been doing, it became easier to see that her drinking no longer marked that subtle dividing line between work and private life but was something else, something more profound, which could no longer be ignored. I confronted her about it and the answer I got was yes, of course — it wasn’t any longer about a dividing line or another glass for the cook but was an inevitable consequence of that old familiar pain of just being alive.

“What?” I said.

Her cheeks lushly covered in roses, she said with a smile that she drank to make herself happy. It was simply an attempt to have a break from the pain of living and a bit of fresh air in the shape of pure joy wasn’t really anything I could reproach her with, was it?

“Of course not,” I replied. “You’re just drinking to make yourself feel happy, the way people who drink do. Cheers, Encarnación.”

As I recall the bottles we bought were always expensive and I kept them out of sight of whatever friends and acquaintances came to pay us a visit. I suppose that was an attempt to hide our distress.

In any case the inevitable occurred one day. Because “one for the cook” or “the medicine against the pain of living” or whatever we chose to call it had shifted further and further away from dinner and sometimes started as early as the morning. That remoteness of hers I had found so attractive started to disappear a little, some days she went out several times, in the morning to buy bread and the paper and in the afternoon to walk around window-shopping. Once she was supposed to do the shopping after the siesta and went off to Mercadona where she had some difficulty walking along the aisles. One of the neighbours had seen her. So soon the entire staircase was talking about Encarnación wobbling around the store, reeking of cirrhosis. I made no bones about confronting Encarnación and said she was getting a reputation as an alky and it was dragging us down, all the respect we had spent so much time acquiring would be totally lost if we continued like this. She put her hand on my shoulder at that point as though she was trying to calm me, called me darling, and then told me it was like Leonard Cohen says, that we’re all cracked, that each one of us is broken in some way or another, that light enters through our flaws.

I nodded and looked away. I felt offended. She was glossing song lyrics, easily digested and universally applicable lines, sufficiently universal, I supposed that even a stranger outside that bubble of hers could understand them.

“But what if that crack gets deeper?” I said. “What about if it gets so wide you can see the shape of something straight out of a nightmare?”

“Cheers, Rodrigo,” was her reply.

I toasted her back and kept on refusing to take seriously the onset of that nightmare vision. I kept on working long hours; I continued accepting her habits. Because where exactly, I asked myself rhetorically once again, does the dividing line run between a glass of wine for the chef, a glass of wine with food, and alcoholism pure and simple?

For several weeks we felt acutely embarrassed whenever we took the rubbish out, but then Encarnación stopped going shopping or showing herself to the neighbours in any way at all. As her introversion had now become absolute, that episode was over and done with for the most part. But some aspect of it lingered on all the same, a kind of festering pus that made our lives feel stagnant.

In any case one day I asked her, just like that and without any fuss, to stop drinking and to behave decently. She had a dreadful fit of rage in response. She was standing in front of me on the sitting-room floor; behind her were the suite of sofas and the potted plants we had placed in the various corners.

“Where is the poetry in you, for Christ’s sake?” she shouted. “You behave as if you were a motorway whose only function is to connect point A and point B.”

She probably didn’t put it like that exactly, they may not have been her very words, she may not have used the complex construction “whose only function is” but that was the gist of her outburst in any case. She also said that all the sympathetic people she had ever known had died of an overdose of heroin.

“So all the sympathetic people you know have died of an overdose of heroin, have they?” I shouted back.

She nodded stubbornly.

“So give me one example then,” I said. “Give me one example of a single sympathetic person in your world who died of an overdose of heroin.”

She hesitated, but after a while she said that was how Robinson Jeffers had died.

“Robinson Jeffers!” I yelled. “Robinson Jeffers! First I doubt whether Robinson Jeffers died of a heroin overdose. Second he is a writer, and dead. You never knew him.”

“I did know him,” Encarnación shouted. “I have never known anyone as well as I know Robinson Jeffers.”

We continued to shout at each other for a long time, while being stared at by the furniture surrounding us. The gilt handles of the doors were gleaming in the evening sunshine and it was if they were promising us they would continue to exist there for many decades to come. They were, of course, completely indifferent to whether we continued to live there or not.

One day in May I was telephoned by Alba Cambó.

“Hi,” she said sounding cheerful. “It’s been ages.”

“Hasn’t it,” I replied. “How are you doing?”

“Good,” she responded. “Summer’s here.”

I replied that yes it was. I asked what she had been doing of late.

“Loads of things. I’ve moved and I’ve been travelling.”

“Where?”

“To Italy.”

She had been to Italy for several weeks and got to know a former actor, and they had fallen in love and he had just moved in with her.

“What about Ilich?” I asked.

“I haven’t heard from him,” Alba said. “I think he’s met someone else.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

There was silence for a while at the other end.

“Do you want to meet up?” she said then. “Maybe we could get a room at a hotel for an afternoon? Just to chill?”

I laughed.

“What about your Italian?”

“Not with him there. He’ll have to stay at home.”

“And do the dishes I suppose?”

“That’s right,” she laughed. “Do the dishes. That would serve him right. I gave up Blosom for him. I had Blosom, who was a friend and who helped me here at home besides, and I swapped her for Valentino who just lies on the sofa like a bag of dead meat and never lifts a finger.”

“How silly of you, Alba,” I said ironically. “It was silly to make a sacrifice like that for love.”

“Wasn’t it,” she laughed again. “Anyway I just happened to think of you. Do you want to come and rescue me for a couple of hours?”

I sighed.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t do that kind of thing any more.”

“Whoops,” she said. “Have you gone and got religion?”

“It’s not that. But I’m fighting to save my marriage. You know. My wife. Encarnación.”

“The crossword solver?”

The crossword solver? Had I referred to her that way?

“Or my wife, as she also happens to be,” I said.

“Okay,” said Alba. “I get it. It’s just that I want you to know how grateful I am for everything you have done for me. I got you involved in that business with Ilich. That could have turned out badly but it didn’t.”

“We had a bit of luck,” I said.

“Not luck,” she said. “Skill, patience and love. On your part.”

I assumed that was a compliment but I felt disturbed by her remark.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I’ve really no idea, Alba. I just feel I have to get … ”

There was a pause.

“What?” she asked.

“I really haven’t a clue,” I said. “I just don’t know. But I’d like to hang up now as long as it doesn’t upset you.”

“Okay. Keep well. We’ll be in touch.”

We hung up. I think I heaved a sigh of relief, thinking that would be the last time I heard from her.

I made one final attempt to rebuild things with Encarnación a few days before Ilich came back on the scene. In retrospect that attempt feels patently ludicrous, which is the way of things when you look back and are forced to confront your own unremitting naivety, even though you realise perfectly well that feelings of dismay may be a sign that you’ve evolved to some extent, that you can look back at yourself and think, Rodrigo, how gullible and romantic you were then. Only what are you supposed to do with that insight? It’s all too late anyway, and the insight is about as useful as a dead person winning the lottery.

I was thinking: I’ll buy her some roses. Red roses are romantic, maybe a bit old-fashioned and overly traditional, but why not, aren’t they beautiful as well? I walked down to the florist’s and bought red roses for my wife, and the man who tied them together winked at me and said that roses were still the best bet if you were trying to seduce a woman.

“That’s right,” I said.

I went back up to the flat with the roses, handed them to Encarnación who said how happy she was to be given them, they were gorgeous, it must have been years since she was last given red roses by anyone. She put them in a large vase and walked round with them for a while to find the right place. Finally she plumped for a spot outside on the terrace, in a corner, perhaps the least visible point in the entire apartment. I said, and presumably I couldn’t hide my disappointment, that I had been picturing them blazing red and free beside her as she was sitting on the terrace doing her crossword puzzles (as if a fissure to the past might suddenly open and we could just slip into it and find our way back), that was what I had in mind when I bought them, I said, and that she would want to keep them close to her as a reminder that her husband loved her and that that was something she would want to be reminded of almost all the time.

“Too much sun,” she said.

The same night I dreamed about Ilich when he told me about the man who ate the rotting meat. I could hear it clear as a bell in my dream, the whole story from the very beginning, the man who ate the rotting meat and had to force it into his mouth. I woke up in a sweat, I got up and brushed my teeth, and then I went back to bed and had a vision of that man again, standing in front of the butcher’s shop digging into the bag of meat scraps he was holding with emaciated fingers, his eyes ravenous. The next morning I felt so dejected that I looked up the number for a psychologist. I got an appointment a few days later and met with a kindly man who listened to me while sitting in a chair opposite. I told him about all the ideas that had been spinning round inside me like clothes in a tumble dryer run amok: about what Ilich had told me of the fifty-year curse, about Del Pozo, about the starving man and his bag of scraps and about the swingers’ club. I also told him about the roses and the alcohol, and I could hear how confused and disconnected it all sounded but I went on, nevertheless, to describe how I was starting to feel downright panic more and more frequently. Then I said, maybe to remove the sting of how dramatic it might have sounded to the psychologist (although you imagine a psychologist has actually heard it all, you can be overcome with shame when you openly reveal your confusion) that I was surprised by how familiar I was with the feeling of panic, it was as if I had always carried it around inside me waiting for it to blossom and take over, and it was almost a relief that it had become as pronounced as it had. And it was odd that I knew it so well because I had never really experienced any particular feelings of anxiety previously, I said. Nor could it be said that I had been exposed to any significant trauma. The psychologist said nothing, and I kept on talking. I said that my astonishment went deeper than that. It happened, for instance, that some nights when I lay awake I became convinced I knew exactly what it would be like to die. I could see the flicker of accident scenes, scenes I couldn’t remember seeing in real life but that were now perfectly clear. And as I was lying there trying to fall asleep I might also see objects rushing towards me at high speed in the semi-darkness. The psychologist then asked what kind of objects they were and I said that sometimes they were pieces of metal, and at other times rocks and gravel and sometimes they were … pieces of flesh. The psychologist made notes and nodded. When he looked up afterwards, he said that wasn’t something to be surprised about at all because the sense of danger and death was an ancient inheritance inside every human being.

“A bit like imagining we have a collective memory card in our spines,” he said.

It was logical, he went on, to think that natural selection was based on the principle that those who felt panic, a fear of death, and had sufficient imagination to sense danger at an early stage, were the most likely to survive because they were more inclined to avoid life-threatening situations in a natural environment. All the good-natured and gullible ones who watched the sunsets in silence had been devoured by sabre-toothed tigers long ago. That’s one explanation for anxiety and how inheriting it could serve the surviving sections of humanity.

Once he had said this, he looked down at his papers for a long time. I was waiting for him to say something else, for him to relate the collective aspect he had been talking about to my own situation as an individual, but he didn’t. Instead he let another minute pass and then looked at the clock and said that the session was over for today.

Three months passed between leaving Ilich outside his building on the outskirts of Barcelona and meeting him again, this time in my own sitting room. I had been on a visit to a client in Ciudad Real for the day; it had been hot and I was longing for a cool shower and a cold beer. I remember entering the hall we shared and how I could feel that something was different the moment I came in. There was no stuffy smell. The shoes were neatly arranged. Encarnación’s thin poplin coat had not been thrown on the footstool but had been put on a hanger. I let the door slide shut behind me and pricked up my ears to anything going on in the flat. There was the sound of soft murmurs. I took off my shoes and put them in a row with the others. Then I went into the guest toilet and took off my shirt. It was clean and tidy in there too. I washed my armpits, hands and face. I went into the kitchen and poured water from the fridge into a glass. Then I moved into the sitting room and there they were: Encarnación and Ilich. Sitting opposite one another in the armchairs, and with glasses of mineral water in front of them. Bret was sleeping at Encarnación’s feet. Everything around them was clean and neat. None of the signs of the sloppiness of the last few months were visible in the room. There were no empty wine glasses anywhere. Even the television screen was free of dust. Encarnación gestured towards the sofa.

“Have a seat,” she said. “You must have had an exhausting day. Your friend Ilich dropped by.”

I looked at Ilich and he was holding his hands in front of him as though in apology. I could feel my guts clenching. Was he here to show Encarnación the film? Had he already done so? Was the die already cast and had disaster struck? I drank my water and looked from Ilich to Encarnación, trying to work out exactly what had happened before I came through the door. It was impossible. Their faces gave nothing away; instead they were looking at me with friendly and open smiles I could not understand at all.

“I just happened to be passing,” Ilich said. “I thought I’d look you up just to say hello. And to let you know about the book I read.”

He leant forward and picked up a book off the table, holding it out to me the way an umpire holds up a red card to a player at a football match. The Old Man and the Sea.

“Right,” I said and looked at Encarnación.

“I was having a sleep when Ilich arrived,” she said. “Only of course I’d forgotten to lock the door.”

She rolled up her eyes at being so scatterbrained.

“So Ilich came in. And guess what he did?”

“What did he do?” I asked.

She looked at me as secretively as a seven-year-old, before exclaiming:

“He did the cleaning!”

I leant back in the armchair. I stared at Ilich.

“You did the cleaning?” I said. “Here?”

“I just thought,” Ilich began, “someone must be lying down having a sleep. Maybe Don Rodrigo, and if not Don Rodrigo then Rodrigo’s lovely wife.”

He winked at Encarnación who laughed out loud.

“So I started picking things up. Putting things to rights. And begging your pardon, Rodrigo, but the place looked bloody awful. Like a pigsty. You ought to have got someone in to give your wife a hand. If she is suffering from depression like she just confided in me then she shouldn’t have to deal with all the crap. A husband ought to take better care of his wife, if he really loves her that is.”

He sounded like he was giving me a lecture. It was pathetic, considering what a loser he was. And it was completely ridiculous for him to sit there telling me off in front of my own wife, given that I had helped him and how grateful he had been. I had no idea what to say. I sipped my glass of water.

“It was so clean when I got up,” Encarnación said and ran a hand through her hair. “I felt so happy. He’d even cleaned the bathroom. I had a cool bath, and Ilich went down to buy fruit and water. We’ve been sitting here the whole afternoon, talking about literature and eating pineapple.”

Right. So Ilich had walked in, a stranger, obviously, because even though we had met before he could only be described as a stranger in my home, and like the stranger he was he had begun to clean up. Then he had gone and got the shopping. They had talked literature and eaten pineapple.

“I see,” I said. “That sounds nice.”

“It was,” Encarnación said. “And we were waiting for you. Ilich kept repeating that he didn’t want to intrude and that he ought to go and come back another day when you were home, but I insisted he stay on, that you would be turning up at any minute.”

Encarnación got up and picked up her glass of water.

“And now I’ve said that,” she said, “I’m going to go and lie down again and leave you two to talk about your stuff which I’m sure doesn’t concern me and wouldn’t interest me either.”

She lifted a hand towards Ilich, who raised his own towards her (I thought his eyes were roving appreciatively over her body). Encarnación left the sitting room and closed the door behind her. There was silence in the room apart from the air conditioning humming in the background.

“I’m really sorry if you think I just barged in,” said Ilich, and now that the woman was out of the room both the tone of his voice and his appearance were quite different.

“No problem,” I said and tried to radiate the strength and self-control I supposed this conversation would require. “I’m just a bit tired. I’ve been travelling on business all day.”

“I get it,” Ilich said. “If you want I could leave and come back another day.”

The idea of Ilich coming back another day felt even less appealing if that were possible than his staying on.

“What was it you wanted to talk about?” I asked.

“First off I wanted to say something about the book,” he said. “The one I promised to read.”

“Honestly,” I said, “I couldn’t care less whether you read it or not. I’m not such a fan of the human race that I’m bothered one way or another if people read The Old Man and the Sea.”

“So that was all just an act?”

“What was an act?”

“All that stuff about young people and reading groups?”

I drank from my glass.

“I don’t know that it was an act,” I said with a sigh. “I just didn’t really have you in mind when I said it. Get to the point, would you? Like I said, I’m pretty tired after what has been a long day.”

“Okay,” Ilich began. “In that case I just want to say first off that the book is really okay.”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh.

“Okay? You’re holding one of the greatest books in all of literature in your hands and all you can say is it’s really okay?”

“That’s just my way of saying it,” Ilich said and looked blackly at me. “That’s not something to diss me for. I may not have read all your fancy highbrow books, Don Rodrigo, but I have read this one and I read it my way and now I plan on saying something about it. Then I will go out that door over there, so you can have a shower, drink your beer and fuck your wife or whatever you feel you’ve got to do.”

“There’s no need to talk about Encarnación that way,” I said.

“Okay,” Ilich said. “You’re right. She’s a real woman. Maybe too much woman.”

“Too much woman for what?

He shrugged his shoulders.

“For you, or for life in general maybe.”

“Okay,” I said and did my best to swallow the insult. “What was it you wanted to say about the book?”

“That it’s good, but the best thing is it’s pretty thin.”

“Okay.”

“I like the bit about the fish. It’s exciting when he goes hunting it.”

“Okay.”

“After that it’s a bit up and down. There are bits you can skip without missing anything.”

“Okay.”

“Then I like the moral of the story.”

“The moral?”

“Yes. All books have a moral.”

“Okay,” I said and couldn’t help laughing again. “That’s something you’ve read somewhere, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. And?”

“And the moral of this book is ‘it’s just sour grapes’, or ‘covet all, lose all’. Like a mixture between the two you could say.”

He looked at me in satisfaction.

“Okay, Ilich,” I said. “So if I’ve got this right, you’ve just reduced one of the greatest works in world literature to a hotchpotch of two catchphrases?”

Ilich looked at me blankly. You fucking bastard, I thought. I couldn’t keep that thought at bay; it surged up through my limbs and into my head with the force of a wave. I could see Ilich fawning over Del Pozo in my mind, Ilich and the bag of scraps, Ilich and his dirty fingers on the cover of The Old Man and the Sea, his cretinous, uneducated little brain that sullied all it came in contact with. Sour grapes covets all. The way little people, bewildered people, try and explain art and life using a couple of proverbs designed for the illiterate. I shouldn’t have let him anywhere near that book, I thought. If you want to keep something safe, keep it to yourself, you should never let vulgar and simple-minded people anywhere near it. They turn everything into mincemeat; they can transform a diamond into filthy snow just by looking at it. Calm down, Rodrigo, I was thinking as well, but it was as if that thought never got through. Everything was flickering and turning white before my eyes.

“Ilich,” I said and leant toward him. “You turned up here and you cleaned our flat. I appreciate that. It was intrusive, but kind of you anyway. Encarnación is depressed and doesn’t have the energy to clean or to look after herself. She did look happier just now and I really appreciate that. It makes me feel happy and so I feel grateful to you.”

Ilich nodded, his eyes were riveted on me in his confusion.

“And you’ve taken the trouble to read The Old Man and the Sea. I bet you had to get the bus from your flat on the outskirts to find a bookshop in town, and you must have wandered around in there with a lost expression on your face searching for the book without any idea of who wrote it and what shelf it could be on. That’s perfectly normal for people like you because people like you just aren’t used to doing that kind of thing. You must have wandered around looking blank, and then you probably had to ask a bookseller for help and the bookseller came to your aid, reluctantly and rather scornfully no doubt, while looking down at you because you’ve read nothing and know nothing.”

“Don Rodrigo … ” Ilich said and put his hands up in front of him. “I think maybe you should … ”

“Then you would have taken the bus back to where you live and sat on a chair in your flat and that is where you read the pages, one by one, with a lot of effort and without any real pleasure, but you kept thinking, I’m going to get my act together and read something good, and this is something good, that’s what someone who knows a bit about this business told me. When you finished reading it, you put the book down, relieved at being able to return to your porn mags, your games, to Facebook and your feeble attempts to become someone in the timber sector. All of that is perfectly okay, and I understand it and I realise that things have to be a certain way.”

I drank from my glass again, but there was no water left and just a tiny, inadequate drop ran into my mouth.

“But what drains the life out of me, Ilich, or not so much drains the life out of me as makes me absolutely furious, not to say what makes me see red, is that you then come here, sit yourself down in an armchair in my sitting room and try to tell me with those ignorant little fingers of yours still filthy from that bag of meat scraps that this book can be boiled down to some moronic proverb. I am doing my best to understand you. I really am. Trying to see you as the person you are in the situation you find yourself in but right now it is bloody hard, Ilich, bloody hard, for the simple reason that you’re making it bloody hard for me.”

“Right,” I heard Ilich say. “And?”

“And what I want is for you to just take your book and disappear through that door and never come back. Never set foot in this place again.”

For the first time since starting to speak, I looked straight at Ilich. The face I was looking at was quite different from Ilich’s usual face. I could see that, I registered the fact, and yet it was as though that realisation failed to sink in, as though I failed to understand that what I had said really had changed the situation entirely and that it was going to lead to something new.

“So can you tell me,” Ilich said slowly, “what exactly is the idea behind The Old Man and the Sea? Because I’m guessing you’ve understood it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course I have.”

I paused for a bit and wiped my forehead with a handkerchief I had in my pocket.

“The Old Man and the Sea,” I said, “is about what it is like to catch a really big fish, a big fish, Il-ich (I said it like that, emphatically, with his name, though as I’m recounting this I can’t see why, it must have sounded ridiculous). Two champions meet. The fisherman is a champion, and the fish is another. It takes them days to get started, the fish cannot be sure that the fisherman is a worthy champion. But then the battle gets going. The battle between champions. The battle against the deeps, Ilich.”

Ilich grinned uncertainly.

“The fisherman wins the fight, catches the big fish and ties it to the boat. It is dead, captured, his trophy. Only then all the others arrive, and none of them will allow the fisherman to keep his fish. Do you get it? Do you get it, Ilich? That it’s all about that struggle. Landing the big fish that no one will let you keep. As soon as you return to the real world, it is diminished and a load of little fish eat it up, chew it apart. There are only scraps left of what was supposed to be your trophy, your work. It has all been in vain because of all the stupidity. That’s what it is about, Ilich.”

I took out my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped it over the nape of my neck.

“You’re sick, you are,” I heard Ilich mumble. “Fucking sick in the head, mental, that’s what you are.”

I couldn’t put up with any more of it.

“Okay Ilich,” I said exhausted. “I may be sick and mental and whatever else you like. But I know what I’m talking about. And I think this is about as close as you and I are ever going to get. Can’t you just leave now? Just have the kindness to leave right now?”

“I suppose,” he said getting up, “that that fisherman is you. And all the noble intentions, the big fish, are a pathetic attempt on your part to get people to read, or something else maybe, something to do with your job.”

He laughed icily while walking towards the hallway.

“Yeah, I see it now,” he said and turned towards me. “Your fish is the calling you feel to create an environmentally friendly world. To promote your kinds of timber, which are superior to all the others.”

He paused for a bit.

“And in that case you’re right, Don Rodrigo. The rest of us, the small fry, the vulgar little fish swimming in your wake, who go to swingers’ clubs and eat rotting meat out of bags, are going to turn your big fish into scraps. I promise you that. We are going to make mincemeat of you and your whole fishy ideal. Your time is up, Rodrigo Auscias.”

He walked to the door, opened it and then slammed it behind him.

“Encarnación!” I called out when he had left.

I felt terribly alone, and I needed someone to talk to about this. But Encarnación must have fallen asleep because no one answered and my call echoed hollowly between the walls.

Obviously I had to ring him up and apologise. The next day I told Encarnación about my outburst, and she got me to see how foolishly I had behaved. I let a week or two pass so the entire episode would have lost its edge and, one day, when I felt rested and in a good mood, I rang him. After a few minutes of lofty disdain, Ilich accepted my apology.

“It’s fine,” he said guardedly. “Forget it.”

During the second part of the conversation he sounded friendlier than he usually did, even getting in before me with several expressions of politeness I had no idea how to reply to. When I asked about Del Pozo he hesitated before answering. I was expecting something cynical about Del Pozo’s cheeks or his nasal and inbred way of speaking, his antediluvian way of doing business, something that might elicit some feeling of consensus between us.

“His wife is ill with liver disease,” Ilich said finally, “and his daughter has left home.”

Even though Ilich’s visit had had an anxiety-provoking effect on me (it lingered in my body for several weeks afterwards), its effect on Encarnación was to make her bloom. During the months that followed she was happier, lovelier, and somehow freer, and she seemed to be making an effort to maintain the order Ilich had reimposed on the flat. Our home looked nice and was tidy now. And the fact that she spent some afternoons outside the flat also seemed to have an enlivening effect. When she came home in the evening she had colour in her cheeks and would drink one glass of chilled cava but no more; she didn’t top the glass up but drank only what she had poured out and then pushed the glass away. She started sitting on the terrace again, although not with crossword puzzles but with books and a small radio plugged into headphones. Sometimes she laughed out loud while listening and now and again I would even see her waving at the neighbour opposite. We went on a trip to Casablanca, another to Helsinki, and I was beginning to rediscover the feeling of firm ground beneath my feet. It was a good time.

Until she mentioned the “fifty-year curse” to me one day. I couldn’t remember where I had heard the expression at first, and it wasn’t until she told me about the academic who was doing research on a writer who was an anti-Semite, a racist and a misogynist that I realised where she must have got it from.

“Who told you that?” I said when she had finished.

“What?”

“What you just told me.”

“A friend,” she said blushing. “A girlfriend. Pamela Pons.”

I made feverish attempts to solve the puzzle in my head. There had to be a ten-year age difference between Ilich and Encarnación. They were completely different as individuals and had nothing in common. Or did they? I tried to imagine them together, tried to imagine what they would talk about, and even worse — what it would be like if their bodies were truly joined. I could picture Ilich moving rhythmically on top of Alba Cambó, that fit body of his, and I felt a pain in my chest when I imagined that the woman with him might not be just Cambó but Encarnación. I tried to keep my suspicions at bay and to persuade myself I was being paranoid, I was seeing things that weren’t there and my brain was spinning so fast I was imagining conspiracies on all sides. I started to go through Encarnación’s pockets like a suspicious housewife. And I didn’t have to wait long before I found a receipt with Ilich’s telephone number on the back. Under it was written:

Carmosin, ring me.

He had even given her a nickname. I felt dizzy when I thought of the speed at which the whole thing was progressing.

That day:

I found the sheet of paper in her room. I’m not one to pry but desperation had led me to prying, I’ll admit I pried, even if I didn’t see the act coming from me so much as the situation. Only what’s the use of self-justification at this point? I simply found the piece of paper and on it was written:

Rodrigo says dreadful things like, ‘You just have to keep going, Encarnación. You may not understand why right now but sometimes you just have to keep walking for no other reason than the path is there beneath your feet. The path is beckoning you on, saying take one step, then another, and then one more. And do you know what? The wonderful thing about walking is that as long as you walk far enough, you end up getting somewhere.’ I don’t know anyone else who would say: if you walk far enough, you end up getting somewhere. I don’t know anyone else who walks for the sake of walking, and it feels like the muscles of my face are going to let go and fall off whenever I hear him say things like that. He doesn’t understand that something in me has died. I feel no tenderness. I loathe him, but I loathe myself most for being able to go on living in this loveless state. I am going to ring Ilich. I am going to fall in love, and falling in love will give me energy. Or I am going to die. I can’t quite make up my mind. Ring Ilich or die. Ring Ilich or die. Ring Ilich or die. Either I ring Ilich. Or I say that’s all, folks! and get off the bus.

I stood there with the letter in my hand, feeling numb. Trembling, I walked into the room where she was sitting.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Everything’s fine,” I said.

I had never seen Encarnación giggle. I have seen her guffaw, smile, laugh up her sleeve, even grin, but I have never seen her giggle. During the almost two decades of our cohabitation I had never seen her nose contract and tiny, fine wrinkles form over the bridge. I had never seen the expression in her eyes before, which I was to see one day when I returned from what had turned out to be yet another in a series of unsuccessful visits to clients.

I parked the car, and everything was normal. I unlocked the door and went inside and everything was normal in the hall as well. It even smelled slightly of floor cleaner and freshly ironed laundry. Encarnación was sitting out on the terrace, only this time she didn’t have a book or a crossword puzzle with her but just a cup of coffee. Her chair had been positioned differently. Instead of being placed so that an observer from the sitting room could see her in semi-profile, it was now on the other side of the table so she was looking straight inside. Behind her I could see the facade of the building on the other side of the street. The pile of papers that was usually lying on a little side table was gone and all there was instead was a little bowl of water with a severed rosebud in it. I said hello and put my briefcase on the floor. Encarnación said hello back and her voice sounded more attentive and warmer than it had for ages.

“Could you come and sit out here for a bit, please,” she said.

She got up, pulled a chair over and placed it on the other side of the table.

“How was your day?” I said when I had sat down.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you before we talk about anything else,” she said.

I got the feeling that she was steeling herself, that she was determined to say whatever it was before the courage deserted her.

“Something that’s very likely to change everything,” she went on.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’ve met a man,” she said then. “I’ve fallen in love.”

“Ilich?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I suspected you knew once I noticed the piece of paper was gone. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“You’re asking me why I didn’t say anything?”

She waved her hand in the air dismissively.

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is we’ve been having a passionate affair for the last three weeks.”

Passionate? I thought. So you and Ilich have been having a passionate affair for the last three weeks, have you? Friendship I could have imagined, maybe even a friendship with erotic overtones, but passionate? Encarnación wasn’t a passionate woman. Or was she? The image of her being naughty and passionate slowly came together in my mind’s eye. And suddenly I could see, as it were, the possibility of that person inside her, and it was as if everything had been shifted out of alignment: her eyes were someone else’s eyes, her mouth belonged to a different person, and even her hair was different. As though a building I had been living in for most of my life and whose every nook and cranny I thought I knew and believed I had seen, explored, and even felt shut in by from time to time, suddenly unveiled a set of alternate rooms, as though a secret door had been opened and was showing me a wing decorated completely differently from the rest of the house, using paints and materials that appeared to have been borrowed from a decadent film. That was where she was now.

“What do you know about him?” I asked.

“Only that his name is Ilich and he works in the timber trade,” she said.

“You’ve no idea how old he is, where he comes from … ”

“And no idea where he lives or who his mother was,” she filled in, completely unconcerned.

Her hair was dancing in the light reflected in the windows of the front of the building opposite. Although the skin under her chin sagged a bit, she looked young, young in a way she never had looked before, beautiful. That’s right, beautiful and exhilarated and uninhibited. I leant back and closed my eyes. Our house was all around us; its walls may have protected us, but perhaps they were burying us as well. That’s right, they were. I can see that now: the walls were burying us and that is what they had been doing the whole time.

“You’d better explain, Encarnación.”

“There’s nothing to say,” she said. “For once there’s nothing to say. For once it’s all perfectly straightforward and uncomplicated.”

But what about me, I wanted to shout. What about me!

After the episode with my wife and Ilich I thought that the game was up. I had lost a large part of my business and I had lost Encarnación. It felt as though I had reached absolute zero and there was nothing left any more. So it may seem rather surprising, if considered, I mean, as part of the larger whole, that I should have been called up a couple of months later, a week or so ago to be more precise, by Alba Cambó.

“I’ve got to see you,” she said. “Is this about Ilich?” I asked, feeling incredibly tired.

“No, it’s about you and me,” she replied.

We met in Parque Güell. We sat on a stone bench beneath the asymmetric vaults. Alba looked the way she normally did, a bit thinner maybe and her hair seemed more faded. She told me about the agency and you; she asked me to do her a favour and come here today. I said that would be fine, and then we sat there in silence.

“You’ve lost weight,” I said.

“I’ve got an evil dragon inside me,” she said.

She told me she had been given the diagnosis a few months ago, but that the tumours had now spread to her brain.

“Three months left,” she said. “Max.”

We sat in silence and looked out over Barcelona. I thought about what I should say, only at that moment everything felt so extraordinarily sad I couldn’t utter a word. The only thing I wanted to say was: “I see.” I could picture how life would simply continue, even though Alba would be gone in three months’ time. People would be walking round Parque Güell the way they were doing now; the traffic would be just as it was now, a distant murmur. At the very moment Alba took her last breath, everything would be exactly the same as it was now, Ilich and Encarnación would be walking hand in hand somewhere, smiling and oblivious. I would be somewhere as well but I had no idea where and with whom. I might be alone in an isolated spot.

“How fucking sad,” was all I said. “How unbelievably fucking sad.”

“It is sad,” Alba said. “All the same there is this one thing that keeps me going.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The idea I have done some good.”

“The idea you’ve done some good?” I said.

“Yes, that I’ve had some kind of positive impact on the people closest to me. If I have managed to make them feel happiness, my life won’t have been in vain. It will all have been worth it in that case. And I can die in peace.”

I nodded. A small child was walking slowly in front of us and the mother was walking behind it carrying a red three-wheeler in her hands.

“So that’s why I asked you to come here today,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure that I had done some good in your life as well.”

I turned my head and stared into her eyes. I felt the laughter rising from my belly. I tried to repress it but it forced its way up through my throat and hurled itself out of my mouth. I could see how crushed she looked when it erupted like an avalanche, and I could hear my own voice saying that fuck no, whatever she might believe, she hadn’t been a positive force in my life. A curse is what she had been, an absolute curse and nothing else.’

‌

When I woke the next morning, Rodrigo Auscias was gone. His side of the bed had been neatly made; it was as if he had never been there apart from a whiff of the scent he wore. I went into the bathroom and found some rolled-up banknotes in a toothbrush glass for the sum we had agreed upon. I walked round for a bit looking for any note he might have left, but I couldn’t find anything.

‌

I will have reached the end soon. Everything feels strangely empty. I am still at Calle Joaquín Costa with a pen in my hand and the tops of the plane trees above me, but there aren’t any sounds from the terrace below and no sounds either from the flat at my back. The terrace below is deserted, and Blosom and Mum are sitting behind closed doors watching Latin American soap operas on television. Sometimes I think of Auscias. None of us talk about Alba Cambó any more. It is as if we have already forgotten her, as if she never existed.

‌

Alba Cambó died in a brightly lit antiseptic room at the Sant Rafael Hospital in Barcelona, one of those rooms whose only purpose is to allow people to die in peace without any distractions. There were no windows in the room, and the walls must have been soundproofed because the silence within felt padded and muffled. A lot of people had died in that room before Alba Cambó, and people would continue to die there that very afternoon while her body was still cooling under a sheet that had been stretched over her by two nurses and folded down just below her chin. The ironed and folded sheet lent her corpse an air of propriety almost, an impression that was completely at odds with the black hair she never brushed and that stretched across the pillow like a broom head despite the stillness of her body. There was a lack of solemnity to the situation. A mobile phone in someone’s jacket pocket rang at the moment of death, and two nurses could be heard chatting about a colleague in the corridor outside. A patch of sunlight wandering through the room or a breeze entering suddenly through an open window, or a murmur coming from the street, would have provided that sense of the infinite, of something coming to a complete stop at moments like these. Looking back, there was nothing lofty about the situation, nothing to make it memorable. It was more as if the death that occurred that afternoon and in that room was routine and industrial, the inevitable and unspectacular forwarding of Alba Cambó’s body from one dimension to another.

Once she was dead, she was transferred to the funeral home in a black van; it had no windows either. During the wake we all stood on the other side of the glass and observed her where she lay, surrounded by flowers, her skin glowing and a smile on her lips. That smile was achieved by pulling an invisible thread from the corners of her mouth to her ears, according to Madame Moreau. Even though it was Madame Moreau who shared this slightly macabre bit of information, she was the only one of us to cry. She blew her nose in a cloth handkerchief, and I must have been in a state of shock as well, because it wasn’t her grief I was witness to — a grief that lent her a dignity the rest of us lacked — what I saw instead was her handkerchief filling with warm mucus and then being crumpled up and stuffed into her skirt pocket. Valentino Coraggioso, who should, formally at least, have been the one to mourn Alba Cambó the most, dished up his usual clichés, ‘Now all the breaths have been taken, all the accounts settled,’ and ‘No one is master of the last moment of their lives.’ That last one sort of jarred considering Cambó had said she could imagine dying any way at all (and it is courageous to say you can imagine dying any way at all), apart from in a hospital in an airless room without any windows. I tried to forgive him. I thought about that day in the car when he had cried and I had been forced to put up with his tears. Maybe I had been too cold toward him at that point; maybe I should have listened to him the way I listened to Auscias.

The day after the wake Cambó’s body was transported to the cemetery in Sitges. With its old monumental graves and cypresses that provide shade for marble angels and strutting pigeons, the cemetery in Sitges is one of the most beautiful in Catalonia. It is completely quiet inside, even though the sea is pounding away right on the other side of the thick wall that surrounds the cemetery. The only thing you can hear is a bit of wind moving in the treetops and through the cellophane wrapped around the plastic flowers that stand in tall vases by the graves. This is a faint and rather chilly rustling sound, almost a whisper, like delicate voices, dry as paper. There are cigarette butts and the odd empty bottle on some of the graves, which makes it look as though people meet there at night and use the large graves as benches to sit on. Though it wasn’t one of the grander graves that was waiting for Alba Cambó. Those graves were family graves and, as Madame Moreau observed in that know-all way of hers, if you haven’t got a family then you cannot be buried in a family grave. Madame Moreau was the one who had taken care of the burial arrangements while Alba was still alive. She had looked into where Alba’s parents and any siblings she might have were buried and discovered that Cambó had no siblings and, as for her parents, they were not lying in the same grave but at opposite ends of the enormous cemetery in Caudal de la Ribera, a village in the hinterland whose motto according to the inquiries Moreau made was: pueblo chico, infierno grande. She couldn’t be buried there. Moreau managed to find a place for her by the sea instead without any scent of the hinterland, just of the coast, space and salt water.

The grave itself was of the simplest kind. A gap in a wall that contained coffins separated by a few decimetres in a kind of apartment block for the dead. Madame Moreau kept on sharing macabre bits of information and told us that there was a drainage system behind the wall, a Venice of death fluids that Cambó would soon be flowing into.

The words chiselled into the front of the grave were: Alba Cambó Altamira, 1968–2010.

The idea that Valentino Coraggioso really would stay on to deal with Cambó’s effects was not one any of us believed. The last few months the two of them had lived in a kind of hell, with Valentino, who was an actor, after all, and accustomed to spending his days under a parasol on a cliff top in Liguria, foundering under a host of practical demands. Madame Moreau judged him harshly and stopped responding when he spoke to her even while Alba was still alive, which must have been painful for Cambó, bedridden, ashen-faced and locked inside an entirely hopeless struggle with pain. During the last days of Alba’s life, Moreau slept on a mattress on the floor beside Alba’s bed while Valentino slept on the sofa in the sitting room. Moreau also dealt with all the practical arrangements during those last few weeks and, if she delegated anything, it was to us in the flat above, never to Valentino, who ended up sitting listlessly on the terrace, drinking Italian beer and dressed in a pair of silky shorts with stripes that read Milan on one side.

The very first night after the wake Valentino moved into a hotel. Mum, Moreau and Blosom cleaned the flat and put everything they found of Valentino’s in a cardboard box they left out on the street. One morning they said the cur had been to fetch his things. He must have crept over that night with his tail between his legs, because the box was gone by morning. Blosom rang to find out if he had really been the one to take the box. He replied that it had been him. Blosom hung up without saying anything because she couldn’t think of anything to say to a man like him, a man who had lived in Cambó’s home, eaten her food and slept in her bed, shared her life and now was backing away without exhibiting even a shred of grief or any desire to honour her memory.

That last bit wasn’t quite true. The same night Valentino came to fetch the box, I went down to see him on the street. He threw a stone at the windowpane in the sitting room where I sleep. I saw him standing there and once I had shoved on a dressing gown I went down. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on for the funeral and his hair was greasy and stuck to his scalp.

‘I’m going to go home to Liguria now,’ he said. ‘I have to start living again.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘First it was Alba’s illness that was killing me and now it feels like the women around her are kicking my corpse. You can’t win against someone like Moreau, I knew that the first time I met her, and Blosom could wipe any man out with that toughness of hers and a bottle of ammonia.’

He looked up at our terrace.

‘Only Alba deserves an obituary I can’t give her. And I need your help for that. I want you to write something about her.’

He took out his wallet and skimmed through the banknotes as though he was considering how much this particular service could be worth. He pressed some notes into my hand. I stared at him.

‘I didn’t know her,’ I said. ‘I can’t write about her.’

‘I didn’t know her either,’ he replied. ‘Even though we lived together for almost two years, I really don’t have any idea who she was.’

We stood there on the street and it looked so empty. Alba’s terrace was abandoned, and the bougainvillea hanging over the wall had dried out a bit. The cellophane is rustling at the cemetery in Sitges, was what I thought in that moment. Valentino shook my hand, adjusted the stained white collar of his shirt, picked up his box and started walking down the street. His back was straight and for a moment just before he turned the corner, I thought I could hear him whistling.‌

Lina Wolff has lived and worked in Italy and Spain. During her years in Valencia and Madrid, she began to write her short story collection Många människor dör som du (‘Many People Die Like You’; Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2009). Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, her first novel, was awarded the prestigious Vi Magazine Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. Her second novel, De polyglotta älskarna (The Polyglot Lovers), is forthcoming from Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2016.

Frank Perry has translated the work of many of Sweden’s leading writers. His work has won the Swedish Academy Prize for the introduction of Swedish literature abroad and the Prize of the Writers Guild of Sweden for drama translation.