This Too Shall Pass (13 page)

—Isn't that how Cinderella ends? She finds a shoe just her size? Martí says, looking at me with a calm smile.

—Oh, you're right. It hadn't occurred to me! I say, removing my foot from the espadrille and giving it back. —I have to get going. See you around, Martí. I kiss him at the edge of his lips and run away, before my princess's garb turns into rags and me into a pumpkin.

I've never been in a hotel in Cadaqués before, and though the sight from the balcony is such a familiar one, I feel like I'm back in that unsettling and foreign space of a hotel room that's not meant for sleeping. It's a place where you're always alone even when accompanied, like a soldier preparing himself for battle; there's only a warrior's respite; short, deep, and provisional.

—I'm so sorry—I know I'm late.

—Don't worry, but I'm nearly out of time.

Through the window I can see night has fallen completely, it must be nearly midnight. I smile at his sad face, the glassy eyes of a lost, addicted boy. He's never angry; no matter what I do, no matter what I say, Santi never gets angry with me. I think he considers my rudeness and outbursts the price to pay for an unequal relationship, because he doesn't realize that you can't take something away that hasn't ever been given, and if we split up, I'm the one with the least to lose.

He undresses me methodically and with a sort of slow, grateful clumsiness. His eyes are red and his mouth tastes like paper towels—he must have smoked a joint while he was waiting for me. I let him go about things, sensitive and alert, anxious for the moment when I'll lose my balance, and the warmth of my belly will spread like an explosion all over my body. He comes in a minute and a half, like a soft, docile baby, incapable of taking me with him to the other side, and then spends the following ten apologizing, instead of putting them to better use.

—I'm really sorry, I'm just mega-tired.

—Don't worry about it, I lie, in a bad mood now, as my heated body cools off, my lips dry out, and my desire flutters about the room, without a specific objective, like a listless but persistent cloud.

He gets up suddenly and I watch his reflection in the wardrobe mirror. For the first time I realize how small his head is and that he's going bald.

—You use “mega” too often, I say, slowly sharpening my words.

—You used to love it—it used to make you die laughing.

—My mother would roll over in her tomb if she heard you.

He smiles sweetly with his nicotine-stained teeth. I look at him carefully and he seems like a costume that slowly begins to disintegrate—the brown skin, the four-day beard, the dry martinis, the ferocious wolf hands, the bracelet from some music festival past. It's not that the man standing before me is ugly—on the contrary—but he's not the man I fell in love with, he's no longer a whole, he's just a set of qualities and defects, a man like any other, for whom my love is no longer a charm against being out in the cold.

—That's too bad. I have to get going, he says with orphan eyes, while the invisible cloud that's hanging above his reckless head swells with the coming rain.

—You know what's going to happen, don't you?

—What?

—Your wife is going to leave you again, and she's going to fall in love with another man.

—It won't be easy for her to find someone else—she's not like you.

I recall the arrogant woman in the turquoise dress in the butcher's shop with a bit of compassion, and think how sometimes we say miserable and vile things about the people we love the most.

—And then I won't love you anymore.

He remains pensive, seemingly more concerned over the possibility that his wife could find another man than that someday I won't feel like running into his arms, as if it were something that hadn't crossed his mind, as if what had happened once was a sort of natural disaster that could never happen again. He dresses in silence.

—I haven't fucked my wife in a long time. He drops it like a filthy gift at my feet, like a dog who leaves a rodent's rotting corpse as a trophy after a walk in the woods.

—I don't care, that's none of my business, I say, feeling disgusted. He's never mentioned intimacy with his wife before. And I add: —I think we should stop seeing each other.

—Shit, shit, shit, he yells and clutches his head with both hands like an actor trying to convey dismay. —I know I don't give you a lot, but I can't stop seeing you. And he whispers, as if he's afraid to say it, as if it were a lie: —I love you so much.

That's been our problem, I think, surprised to see that I've begun thinking in the past tense, that instead of loving me, you have loved me so much. But I don't say anything because it's already too late and because there's no conversation in the world as pathetic and more destined for failure as two people trying to gauge their love.

His cell phone rings; his wife has just gotten back from a concert in the next town and wants to know where he is. He looks at his very expensive wristwatch, a gift from his father-in-law, which he wears as if it were a wedding ring, and then looks at me with glassy eyes.

—I have to go.

—Yeah, me too.

—We'll see each other soon, OK? He smashes his lips clumsily against mine, which remain passive.

As he walks away, I notice how crooked his legs are.

I sit down to smoke in the town square. The band is still playing but the audience has changed; the creatures of the night have replaced the families, greater in number and more interested in dancing. Until you became ill and died, it had never occurred to me to sit down on a bench in the street. If I was in the street it was to go somewhere or to take a walk, but now I enjoy this stillness in the midst of people, these small rafts of public safety. The world can be divided into those who sit on the benches in the street and those who don't. I guess I now form a part of the collective of old folks, immigrants, and loiterers, those who don't know where else to go. Then I catch a very tall, hunched, vaguely familiar figure in the multitude, his skinny arms that seem to go on forever, raised high above people's heads. He's either dancing or waving to me.

—Blanca! Darling!

He kisses me on the lips, like he did the first day, a thousand years ago, five minutes after we met, in the middle of a table full of people. I think fleetingly of Elisa, with her sharp, shrewd rat's face, armed with all manner of Freudian theories on how to confront and tame the world; too bad she isn't here, she would be able to explain everything to me, and we'd laugh and surely she'd say it was all your fault.

—Nacho!

—What are you doing here by yourself?

—I don't know. Lately everyone's been abandoning me, my ex-husband, my best friend, my lover—

—Come on, he says, grabbing my hand, —let's find a party.

I glance at him as we walk along the town's streets. The king of the world, the junkie athlete, the unrepentant womanizer, has turned into a beggar covered in ashes. We've known each other since we were children but we didn't become friends until I turned twenty, when the age difference—he's nine years older than me—stopped being so apparent and didn't matter anymore. I stopped being a little puppy to him, though he still called me one, and he stopped being an old man to me. He had the perfect combination of lightness and darkness, the kind only star-crossed, romantic men have, that electric luminosity that draws others to them like moths to a flame, with his big doe eyes, and debauched, drug-infused, lifestyle—idle, chaotic and self-absorbed. His physical beauty was so remarkable for so many years that no woman could resist him; I couldn't, either, and we watched the sun come up more than once, huddled together on some beach or under some arch. But despite the affection we claimed, we never went out of our way to see each other in Barcelona, where we both live—we never even exchanged phone numbers. Nacho belongs to the summer just like the boating trips do, or the naps in the hammock, or the freshly baked bread we buy straight from the oven on our way home after being out all night, kneaded by the arms of drowsy men who watch us devour it with sad eyes. He couldn't ever exist anywhere outside of Cadaqués. Cocaine became his only lover in the end; it transformed that ravishing smile into a tense and contorted rictus, stole his puppy eyes and exchanged them for shrewd, hungry, and cloudy ones. His flexible, elegant body became nothing more than a skeleton. I think all this as we walk up the cobblestone steps; he moves stiffly and it seems as though each stride causes pain, as if he were empty. I suppose every body tells its own story of voluptuousness, of horror and helplessness.

We come to a large house with white salons, old leather couches full of cushions, and oriental rugs strewn across a red terrazzo floor. There are candles lit everywhere, some already completely consumed. The great French windows overlooking the town and the sea are thrown wide open, and the pale gossamer curtains flap like captive sails. There are a ton of people, music and drugs strewn across low tables, along with all manner of alcohol and the remains of fruit swooning in huge, colorful bowls. I recognize some of the town's other castaways, children of the first settlers, intellectuals and artists who arrived in Cadaqués during the sixties and filled it with beautiful, talented people who wanted to change the world but, above all, to enjoy themselves. I recognize the children of that generation immediately; the wild ones, like me, were educated by lucid, brilliant, successful, and very busy parents, adults who engaged the world as if it were a party, their party. We are, I think, the last generation who struggled for our parents' attention, which usually only came when it was already too late. Children weren't considered marvelous creatures, they were more like a big nuisance, little things that were only halfway formed. And they turned us into a lost generation of born seducers. We had to invent more interesting and sophisticated ways to attract their attention than pulling at their sleeve or bursting into tears. They demanded the same from us as they did from other adults, or at least that we didn't bother them. The first thing I ever showed you was a piece I wrote that had won me a prize in school—I must have been eight years old—and you told me not to show it to you again until I had written at least a thousand pages, that anything less wasn't a serious effort. Good grades were a given, bad ones an annoyance, borne without colossal rebukes or any form of punishment. My house is covered in my younger son's drawings and I listen to the older one play the piano with the same reverence as if he were Bach come back from the grave. Sometimes I ask myself what's going to happen when this new generation of children grows up, whose mothers consider maternity a new religion—women who breastfeed their children until they're five years old and alternate their tits with spaghetti, women whose only interest and preoccupation and reason for being are their children, who educate them as if they were going to rule an empire, who inundate social media with photos of their offspring, not only at their birthday parties or on trips, but also in the bathroom or at the urinal (there is no more shameless love than the contemporary maternal variety). They'll turn into such deficient human beings, as contradictory and unhappy as we are, maybe even more so? I don't think anyone can come out of being photographed while shitting unscathed.

We sit down on a couch with a couple of Nacho's friends. Immediately, they pass around the cocaine. Nacho accepts enthusiastically and starts to jump all around us playing air guitar to the music that's piping over the speakers, opening his legs wide and strumming the instrument. The girl offers me a line, but I refuse it.

—No thanks, I'm tired. And if I'm not in good shape tomorrow, my children are going to be angry.

—Oh, she says, looking at me surprised. —You have kids. Well, a line will get you going; it'll take the tired away. She's blond and sweet and very thin and brown-skinned, her old T-shirt is a faded rose color, her Indian trousers are nearly transparent and she's not wearing underwear.

—No, really, I'm fine, thanks.

—Are you stupid or what? her boyfriend screams at her suddenly. —Didn't you hear her say no? Leave her alone.

And they shout at each other, although luckily the music is up so high their voices are drowned out, and all I can see are their frantic gestures. Nacho comes and goes bouncing around, and finally, after a few gin and tonics, I allow myself to be carried off to dance with him, like when we were young and still thought the world was going to fulfill all its promises and nothing mattered because everything would turn out just fine. When the song ends, we lie down on the couch together. That's when the sweet, blond-haired girl comes running toward us.

—I was looking for you! Check it out, she says, showing me a photo on her cell phone, —they're my frozen eggs.

—Oh. I look at the unrecognizable image with a gray background and a few stains in a darker shade of gray without knowing what I'm supposed to say, while she looks at me expectantly. —They're very beautiful, I finally answer.

—Oh, aren't they though? she exclaims. They're for when I want to have kids someday. And she adds: —When I'm ready for them.

—How nice. I'm happy for you, I say.

—I just wanted to show them to you. Her eyes are a transparent blue and very candid, and they make my soul shiver, as if I could hover above them and see straight into her body the movement of little rivers of blood, and her heart that's at once skittish and brave.

After she leaves, Nacho says: —She's beyond the point of salvation. He might be salvageable, but she's too far gone. Her father is a very important doctor in Madrid and it was his idea to freeze her eggs.

He brushes my hair from my neck and starts kissing it, pecking at it like a bird.

—And what about us? he asks. —Are we going to sleep together? Like in the good old days?