Читать книгу Older Brother - Daniel Mella - Страница 5

His death will fall on 9th February, always two days before my birthday. Alejandro will be thirty-one years old in the early morning of that day whose light he will never see, the day we’ll go from being four siblings to three. I, the oldest son, will be about to turn thirty-eight. That same morning, Mum (sixty-four), sitting beside me in dark glasses, says: ‘Why him, when he liked life so much? Why Ale, when so many other people go around complaining about things all the time?’

On the back porch of my parents’ house, while Dad (sixty-nine) and Marcos (twenty-seven) are on their way to Playa Grande to identify the body, I brew mate for the guests: the cousins, the aunts and uncles, several neighbours. Since no one sits still I have trouble remembering the order the gourd should be passed around in. Mum wasn’t far off the mark.

You’re right, I tell her. It should have been me.

She huffs. She didn’t mean that. But I tell her that it would have been entirely fitting. Right? After all, who’s the pessimist around here? I ask her.

‘Why does everything always have to be about you? The truth is, I don’t know what’s got into you lately. You were better, but lately I just don’t know.’

I ask her when the last time she saw me happy was. But happy like Alejandro, I say: bursting with happiness. Every stew he ate was the best stew he’d ever had, remember? If he rode a wave, it was the best wave of his life. Have you ever seen me completely happy?

Mum looks at me for a few seconds. I can’t see her eyes behind the glasses. Her hands are resting on her knees and her foot taps a nervous rhythm.

‘I can’t think right now,’ she says.

Because it’s not easy to remember, I tell her. But when was the last time you saw Alejandro happy? I’m sure Ale was happy the last time you saw him. And the time before that, too, and the time before that… Wasn’t he the happiest guy you knew?

‘Yes and no. I always thought that Ale had a sadness deep inside him. The life he led, no commitments…’

But who doesn’t have that? Who isn’t always a little sad, deep down? Really, though, you can’t argue that Alejandro wasn’t the best equipped for life out of all of us. Who else had those shoulders? You remember how broad his chest was? He was a lion. He was solar.

‘I remember his hugs. I remember how he used to call me Mumsy,’ says Mum.

Everyone remembered his hugs. Alejandro hugged everyone. He liked to wrap you in the immensity of his body. He did it to show off. He’d hug you so you’d feel his muscles. He’d hug you till you felt the bulge through his trousers.

Once, when I was four years old, I’d knelt down beside my mother’s bed where she lay with the flu, and I’d started to pray for her to get well. She likes to say that it made her feel better immediately. It’s one of her classic memories of me. I always liked to hear her recall that moment, even during our most difficult times. She told that story so often – was she asking me, in a way, to never stop praying for her? I’d never known how to help her. She had never asked me for help. As far as I knew, she’d never asked anyone for help.

She doesn’t like mate. I pass her one anyway. When she finds herself holding the gourd she hands it back to me, gets up, and goes inside without another word, pulling the sliding glass door behind her.

It’s always the happiest and most talented who die young. People who die young are always the happiest of all, I announce to Aunt Laura as soon as Mum is gone.

My aunt, in a chair to my right, has heard our whole conversation. She’s my father’s only sibling. Just like Dad’s, just like mine, her spine is fucked. Our backs are all broken in the lower part. Mine was a vertebra in the sacrum. What you see in an X-ray of my sacrum is a face of translucent bone, its eyes empty – a being from another planet. Chinese doctors call it the face of God. The nose is wide and long and full of protuberances. The mouth, a slightly forked crack, evokes the closed lips of certain reptiles.

Don’t you think? I ask her. The happiest or the most talented. It’s like a law, isn’t it, Aunt Laura? You’ve got to keep an eye on the ones who go through life really happy. They’re dangerous, right? They’re always about to go to shit. I think about it with Paco (seven). With Juan (five), not so much. Juan is dryer, more ill-tempered. But Paco is a kid who wakes up happy, chattering away non-stop. He goes to bed happy, wakes up happy. Everyone will tell you what a cheerful kid, what a lovable child. I wish they’d stop talking like that. You can’t imagine how afraid I am for Paco. Want a mate?

‘You know what your brother told me the last time I saw him?’ she asks me then. ‘He said he had faith in that lifeguard hut.’

The last time she’d seen Alejandro was one night two weeks ago, in La Paloma. Dad was there too: he’d gone to spend a few days with her and my uncle, and it also ended up being the last time he would see Ale. That night they were going to make pizzas in the clay oven, and, knowing how much Ale liked them, they invited him too. He took the bus from Santa Teresa as soon as he left the beach. My aunt, who knew Alejandro was camping, had asked him where he slept during the storms they’d been having. He replied that he went to some friends’ house on the other side of Cerro Rivero, but that sometimes he went to the lifeguard hut on Playa Grande.

‘Can you believe it?’ says my aunt. ‘A lifeguard, a surfer, who knows very well how dangerous the beach is in an electrical storm. He said the hut had been there who knows how many years and nothing had ever happened to it, that it had made it through several winters without the wind tearing it down or lighting striking it. “I have faith in that hut,” he told me.’

I didn’t know Ale had said that. I never had minutes on my phone to call him. We texted, or he’d call me, and he had never mentioned taking shelter in the hut. Not once had it occurred to me that he could be in danger from the storms. I’d had other concerns that summer.

‘I don’t know if this time he didn’t find out about the storm that was coming or what, but it’s just horrible, don’t you think?’ she says.

He had faith in that hut. He left his body in a place he had faith in. I don’t know if it’s so horrible, I told her.

‘I admire your tolerance for pain,’ my aunt says then, using her thumbnails to wipe away her tears.

What do you mean, Aunt Laura? I ask her.

She sips the mate, nodding as she swallows.

‘I admire you, really,’ she says.

She doesn’t know what she’s saying, but it doesn’t matter.

In the grass next to the wisteria, Enrique is drinking his own mate with Guido. Enrique is skinny, his cheeks sucked in by his missing molars. Guido has a potbelly and I’ve never seen him without a moustache. Ever since I can remember they’ve lived next door to each other and diagonal to my parents’ house. Guido is still single fifteen years after his wife left him, he still drives a night taxi, and, at least on the outside, he makes sure to keep his house in good nick. The only difference between his house back then and his house now is the wall that separates it from the rat farm that is Enrique’s house. The wall is over three metres high because Enrique, who swears he has a job sorting waste, has rubbish piled up in some monstrous structures made out of sticks and canvas. From the street there the rubbish heap appears to be completely haphazard. What you see is a bunch of canvases strung up over the piles of rubbish, and behind those you can barely catch a glimpse of the concrete block house built at the back, which was already in ruins when I was little.

‘Don’t those two hate each other?’ asks Aunt Laura. ‘Clearly, anything goes on a day like today.’

The morning of 9th February caught me at my parents’ house. My sons were there, too. The day before, Monday the 8th, I’d brought them to visit their grandparents, and since their cousin Catalina (sixteen) – daughter of Mariela (thirty-nine) – was also there, we ended up camping out in the living room.

The first thing I hear when I come through the sliding door and into the kitchen is Mariela and the kids deciding what film to put on in the next room – my room, now my father’s study. Mum, still in sunglasses, is on the sofa in front of the muted TV. She stares at the screen for long moments, then down at her hands in her lap. As soon as she sees me, she raises the right one, showing me her mobile phone in a strange gesture, as though in greeting, while she grips the remote control with the other hand.

‘Could you send a message to Alejandro?’ she asks me. ‘I’ve been trying, but I can’t see the keys.’

Alejandro’s not there, I tell her. How could I possibly send him a message?

‘Write: Ale, tell me it’s not you, Mum,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’s not him. Maybe they made a mistake.’

And then I’m kneeling before her and taking the phone from her hand, our heads practically at the same level. I explain to her, as though speaking to a deaf person, seeing myself reflected in the lenses of her dark glasses, that Ale’s friends had called. It was Dwarf who found him, a guy who works with him, who sees him every day.

‘If he was hit by lightning, maybe he was unrecognisable,’ she says.

Just then, Mariela emerges from the hallway with the landline phone to her ear. She realises something strange is happening and she tells the person at the other end to hold on. She covers the mouthpiece and her yellow eyes bore into me.

Mum wants me to text Alejandro, I explain.

Mariela thinks for a moment, then tells me to send the message.

Text him? You want me to text Alejandro?

‘Send it and it’s done,’ says Mariela, and she goes back the way she came. We hear her close the door to the master bedroom. On the porch, no one seems to be paying attention to us. Some of them have gone down to the grass to sit in the sun. Then it occurs to me that I could call him. I can call my brother and see who answers. I make the mistake of saying it out loud. Mum grows desperate.

‘No!’ she says. ‘Don’t call him, don’t call him!’

Why not? We’ll save time if I call him.

‘Just send him the message, give me the phone, and forget about it, if it bothers you so much.’

But I won’t be able to forget. I’ll be just like her, waiting for someone to answer the message and hoping that whoever does is my brother, who no longer sees or hears, or has a voice, or fingers to work his iPhone.

‘Text him and give me the phone, please,’ says Mum.

As soon as I send the message, Mum takes the phone from my hands. She says: ‘You didn’t write what I told you to.’

I love you, cocksucker, I’d written.

‘You think that’s cute?’ says Mum when she reads it.

Without warning, I feel the first tears of the day. With her silence, which I can practically lean against, Mum sounds out my pain, but my pain isn’t mine. As if through divination, unable to prevent it, my mind forms the image of Alejandro still alive. There’s no chance, but I picture him coming back from some girl’s house, getting to work late, tired and hungover. Mum seems relieved that we’re now drinking from the same miserable puddle.

‘When we were outside,’ she says then, delicately, ‘I didn’t mean that I would rather it were you instead of Alejandro. I would never say something like that. You misunderstood me.’

Don’t worry. If there were ever a day to go crazy, it’s this one.

She says she’s going to take a minute and lie down.

Not long ago, in September, Mariela buried her baby daughter, Milena, so she knows exactly what needs to be done. She has all the numbers saved in her contacts, and she takes charge of making the necessary phone calls. Her partner Mauro, equally trained, offers his car to take Dad and Marcos to Rocha.

Sitting at the kitchen table, with the sound of the kids’ film on the background, and Mum trying to sleep in her room, Mariela spells out the process: ‘At the morgue they’re going to open him up to see how he died. It was probably electrocution, but they have to rule out all the other possibilities. Tomorrow at eleven, the body will go to the Salhón funeral home, next to the shopping centre. We, the family, will have two hours to be with him there.’

She says it as though it had already happened.

‘We’re going to invite people to come from one to three. The procession leaves at three, and there will be a service at the same cemetery where we buried the baby. Whoever wants to say something will be able to. Instead of a burial, Dad and Marcos say Ale would have wanted to be cremated and to have his ashes thrown out on the beach.’

Thrown out?

‘Is that OK with you? We’ll take him to La Paloma and toss them there.’

It’s OK, but you don’t throw them out. You scatter them, return them, bequeath them.

I remember how the conversation was affecting my stomach. I remember burping and then saying: he died, he’s dead. I remember repeating it. Then Mariela starts reheating the stroganoff. It was already close to noon and the kids hadn’t eaten. As she looks through the fridge, cousin Timoteo taps on the sliding door, comes in carrying the thermos and asks us to boil more water. He hands the thermos to Mariela and goes back outside.

Mauro and Mariela waited fifteen years before they tried for a sibling for Catalina. Mariela wanted to finish university. Then do a postgraduate degree. Then the period when Mauro went on antidepressants after he lost his job. Then they separated for a time, Mauro living with his mother, Mariela teaching, researching and working on her doctorate. When Mauro was finally offered a job just like his old one at a new financial consulting firm, it was Mariela’s turn to have a nervous breakdown, and she was forced to re-evaluate everything. She cut down on her work hours, discovered yoga, took up swimming again, and only then, after they’d got their stability back, did they start trying for the little boy Mauro always wanted. None of Mariela’s examinations during the pregnancy revealed that the baby would be born without an immune system, due to a genetic failure that would also deprive her of all other normal reactions. They found out something was wrong only during the birth itself, when the baby didn’t make any effort to be born and let Mariela do all the work. Milena couldn’t latch onto the breast, her little fingers didn’t grasp, she never returned a smile. But some communication was possible. I sang to her when I held her and her eyes stopped wandering. Sometimes you’d wonder if you were imagining it – and that doubt left you utterly alone – but the baby did listen. Sometimes she seemed to smile a sweet, crazy smile. Her temperature had to be taken every four hours, her oxygen had to be regulated, she received food and antibiotics through a tube. Mariela and Mauro personally carried out the nursing duties. During the nine marathon months of her daughter’s life, Mariela’s eyes turned yellow, forever changing from their usual honey colour.

‘Idiot,’ says Mariela while she fills the kettle with water. ‘Going into the lifeguard hut during the worst storm.’

He had faith in the hut. Apparently he went there a lot. According to Aunt Laura, it wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night there.

‘I know, I talked to him. He didn’t worry much about taking care of himself.’

He didn’t give a shit.

‘He didn’t have kids. What was it Mum wanted?’ she asks. ‘For you to text him? Poor woman.’

After a few minutes of talking about who knows what, if we even talk at all, I ask Mariela if she doesn’t think it should have been me who died instead of Alejandro. Mariela looks at me disconcertedly from the other end of the kitchen while she stirs the pot of chicken stroganoff.

I mean, if someone had told you one of us was going to die, who would you have bet on? I ask her. Wouldn’t you have bet on me?

Mariela says she’s never thought about it. Me neither, I tell her, but a second later I wasn’t so sure.

I’ve always believed I’d be the first.

‘And why would you think that?’

Because I’m the oldest?

‘I’m the oldest.’

But she was a woman. Women don’t count. Women live longer than men. Mariela shakes her head. She thinks it’s very strange for me to think that way, as if these things followed some kind of logic. She thought I was smarter than that.

But it’s not a question of intelligence, I think. Intelligent people were capable of believing the most ridiculous things. There was a time when I’d wanted to write about that, the idiocies dreamed up by people who are known for their superior intelligence. It was all based on what happened to Fernán, a friend of mine, a few years after he got married. The first thing he thought, when his wife didn’t get pregnant, was that she was the problem. He thought of himself as a paragon of fertility just because he had a massive libido and was always ready to go. He thought the two things were synonymous. When the tests said he was the infertile one, he refused to believe it. He found it inconceivable. And he’s one of the smartest people I know. Psychologist, journalist, essayist. I’m thinking about Fernán and about Bob Marley, Mariela’s teenage hero who worshipped an Ethiopian torturer, when Timoteo comes back in asking for the water. Mariela had forgotten to put the kettle on the stove. She promises Timoteo she’ll bring him the thermos as soon as it’s ready. Then she asks me to go and ask Paco, Juan and Cata if they want to eat in the kitchen or in the other room while they watch the film. They unanimously come out in favour of the film. Then I lock myself in the bathroom to call La Negra.

At the end of December she’d moved the boys and her older daughter Yamila to Shangrilá, the neighbourhood where I’d grown up, to live with Fabricio, the fat guy she’d been dating for under two months. By some miracle, she answers my call. When I tell her the news, she cries: ‘No! No! I can’t believe it!’ as if she and Ale had been close.

I ask her if she could come and pick up the boys: you think maybe you should come and get them? There are a lot of people in bad shape here, it’s all really sad. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, I don’t know.

‘What happened? What happened to Ale? What was it?’

Maybe it’s OK for the boys to experience this. It’s a death, nothing out of this world.

‘Stop it. I’m on my way.’

Back in the dining room, Mariela is standing in front of the TV, and Marcos is on it, wearing dark glasses, his long hair pulled back into the same ponytail as always. He’s carrying one of Alejandro’s surfboards and has a bag slung over his shoulder. Dad, his silver head bobbing, walks in front of him. They’re shown from a distance, walking between some low dunes. Maca (twenty-seven), Marcos’s girlfriend, brings up the rear, carrying the other board. Mauro isn’t in the shot; he must have gone ahead. Mariela is looking for the remote so she can turn up the volume. I tell her I’m going to let Mum know that Dad and Marcos are on TV, and Mariela tries to stop me.

‘Why tell her?’ she asks. ‘Leave her be.’

Mum is waiting for Ale to respond to the text message. I find her on her side of the bed, sitting in front of the window that looks out on the street, the curtains drawn. She immediately gets up to come and see the TV. Mariela doesn’t look at her at any point, doesn’t see her freeze at the sight of the screen. Same shot, only now Dad, Marcos and Maca have stopped and are talking. Mum sits down in her recliner. While she settles her arms on the armrests, she becomes aware of the remote control in her left hand. She looks like she’s about to use it, but she keeps the volume on mute until the end.

‘I always thought one day I would see Ale playing guitar on TV. Not this,’ she says, changing the channel.

‘The water’s ready,’ she says later, when the kettle starts to whistle.

The kettle still shrilling, Mariela moving to take it off the stove, I get a text from La Negra: she’s at the front door. I can see her behind the green bars of the front window, her head down, hands clasped over her belly.

‘Are you going to let her in?’ asks Mum, who can see her perfectly well from her seated position.

Instead, I open the door and go outside. La Negra has done her hair in a hundred little braids. She follows me a few steps to the jacaranda tree, out of sight from the house.

‘How are you? How is everybody?’

I need some air. I ask her to hug me. She does, quite deliberately resting her open palms on my shoulder blades. I can’t remember the last time I had her so close. I try to smell her, but my eyes start searching for the fat bastard’s white pickup; I can’t help myself. I find it parked twenty metres up the street, pointed toward Giannattasio Avenue, the sun glinting off the glass. One of my hands comes to rest below her waist, where La Negra has a protrusion instead of a valley, the truncated tail from when she was an embryo. I tell her I’m sorry.

‘What happened?’ she replies, separating her ear from my chest, letting go of my shoulder blades, taking a step back.

I want her to forgive me for being an idiot. The calls, the messages, the invitations. I lost control. You don’t know the hell I was in, I tell her.

‘It didn’t seem like love to me…’

My world was collapsing. Now I know it was nothing. This thing with Ale made me realise. It’s over. The clouds have parted. Death is incredible.

‘Apology accepted,’ I hear her say, and I see her raise a hand to her heart.

On her way to the bus stop, a little girl with a backpack on, her hands stuffed into her jumper pocket, looks at all the cars parked in front of my parents’ house: Mariela’s, Leti’s, my aunt and uncle’s, the cousins’, plus the white pickup. She must think it’s a birthday, or a barbecue.

Her decision to stay with lard-arse Fabricio was for the best. She’d ensured herself a slave forever. Really, I tell La Negra, standing with her in front of my parents’ house. He’s solvent, he’s got his own business. And he’s not exactly good-looking; I mean, he won’t turn many heads in the street. One less worry for you. You did well, good choice. If he’s in the truck, tell him to come on over, it’s all good.

‘I came alone.’

There was a time when I’d even started praying. I’d got to the point of praying that La Negra would find someone, someone who would understand what went on in her head, who would love her the way she wanted to be loved.

‘It’s in the past, Dani. All that is behind us. What happened with Alejandro? Tell me. How are the boys?’

Ale was struck by lightning. The genius slept in the lifeguard hut and he copped it. There was a terrible storm in Rocha. I’ll get the kids for you.

‘I want to come in. If your mum is here, I want to see her.’

Mum greets her as soon as we come in. ‘Brendita, I thought he was going to leave you out there.’

‘Soledad, how awful!’ says La Negra as they hug. ‘How awful, how awful! It’s all so sudden!’

‘You’re a mother, you understand me,’ Mum says, sobbing like a child as La Negra wraps her arms around her and draws circles on her back with an open palm.

When the boys hear La Negra’s voice, they come running from the bedroom and latch on to the hug between their mother and grandmother. I take that moment to go into the bedroom and get their things ready. Cata is lying on the bed and she asks me where Mariela is. I’m not sure where she’s got to. I open the window to air out the room, scour the floor for the boys’ socks, pick up their little trainers and put them in the backpack. Then I let a few minutes pass while I sit on the edge of the bed, watching Pucca, a Korean animation. When I leave the room, Cata has fallen asleep.

The goodbye goes quickly, though Mum, faithful to her habits, tries to drag it out by remembering at the last minute that she’d bought some little gifts for the kids. She goes to her room and comes back with a bag full of other, smaller bags that she pulls out and hands to La Negra.

‘These are some little pyjamas I bought the other day, one pair for each of them. They can choose later,’ she says. Then she takes out some educational toys and some mugs for their morning cocoa. ‘I was going to take them to buy trainers today before lunch, but…’

Taking the large bag from her hands, La Negra puts the smaller ones back inside and hugs her one last time.

Juan runs to the truck as soon as we’re out the door. Paco, though he starts off a second later, gets there before his brother. Wrapping her arm around my neck, La Negra tells me she cares about me a lot and she asks me to be strong, very strong. I want her to call me as soon as they get home so I can be sure they’ve got there all right, but she doesn’t want to. How hard can it be? I ask her.

It’s only five blocks, I need to calm down, there’s no reason to think anything will happen to them. She’s right. There’s no reason for anything to happen to them, I tell her, but no one is ever free. There’s never any certainty about anything.

‘So you want me to call you?’ she asks me.

For her to call me when they get home, that’s all I’m asking. But she doesn’t know if they’re going straight home. Maybe she’ll take them somewhere else first. Maybe they’ll go and play on the swings for a while. The sun is nice. She asks me: ‘You really want to wait who knows for how long to find out if we made it home safe and sound?’

Go straight home, I tell her. Don’t go out, today of all days.

‘I have to go straight home, I have to call you, what else?’ she says, before shouting to the boys not to jump in the truck bed; they’d climbed into it without our noticing.

She doesn’t have to call me. She can go wherever she wants. She’s a free woman in a free country. Don’t call me, I tell her. Don’t let me manage your life. It’s not that I’m nervous. I want to control you. No, I know what I want. It’s something much sadder. I want my phone to ring, and I want it, for once, to be you.

‘I don’t know if you’re being serious or not,’ she says.

So don’t call me, because I won’t answer, I tell her. I haven’t even got the words out before she shakes her head, takes two steps away, and then flashes me the exact same smile as she used to during our first days together, when she’d go with me to the bus stop early in the morning. She wouldn’t wait for me to get on the bus. She’d turn to go as soon as the 6.30 Raincoop came around the corner, and she’d say bye-bye over her shoulder, smiling as she lifted her little skirt just a bit to flash me her panties all up in her arse, so I wouldn’t forget what was waiting for me at home.

During the whole first year of our separation I never touched another woman. I wanted to keep them as far away from me as possible. I couldn’t even look them in the eyes. I wasn’t attracted to La Negra anymore. More than that – she disgusted me. And since she wasn’t sleeping with anyone either, her body turned sad. She had a beautiful arse, but she started to lose it. I remember one time when I saw her from the window of a bus. It was almost noon and there she was, walking along the road dressed in white, on her way to pick up Paco and Juan from school. White trousers, white blouse, white leather boots, her hair straightened. The neighbourhood tart. She hadn’t worn enough clothes, and her arms were crossed to keep herself warm. The trousers, which had once hugged the roundness of her buttocks, were now pinched and gathered. That’s what you get for being a bitch. Hija de puta, I thought.

She was always dressed up when I went by her house to collect or drop off the boys. Sometimes that made me feel good, and other times it made me look down on her. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to seduce me or show some dignity, and I wasn’t interested in finding out. On Wednesdays I’d take the kids to school; on Fridays after school we’d all have lunch together at her house. We wanted the boys to see their mother and father sharing moments without friction, and we gave it our very best.

One of those afternoons after we’d eaten, La Negra handed me a mate and my fingers brushed against hers. I guess they always brushed hers, but that time I felt it. I felt the softness of her skin on my fingers. Starting then, we began to see each other during the school day. Some Saturdays she’d come to my house and we’d have dinner with the boys. The boys didn’t know she’d stay over. So they wouldn’t harbour false hopes, she’d get up at seven on Sunday and left before they woke up. We agreed that we weren’t getting back together. We wanted each other; it was about indulging ourselves every once in a while, but we both had the freedom to be with anyone we wanted.

The sex with La Negra brought my testosterone back, and in a few months I was seeing Clara, a neighbour I’d run into at the bakery and the bus stop and who I’d previously only greeted with a hello or goodbye. On my way to the laundrette I’d go past her house, a little bungalow with a pitched roof and a bare front garden. On weekends I’d see her drinking mate there with some guy or a couple of girlfriends, listening to loud music, Extremoduro, La Polla Records, La Chancha Francisca. She had a broad waist that spilled over her trousers, which she didn’t worry about hiding, and she had a beautiful face. To my astonishment she knew who I was, and she held me in high regard. She was twenty-nine and still needed to take a couple of exams to finish her literature degree from the Artigas Teachers Institute, and she’d been teaching for several years. She read a lot of Latin American literature, and she knew authors I’d never even heard of. Vargas Llosa and the Onetti who wrote long novels were her absolute idols. She was always re-reading them. In fact, she had moods when the only books she could only stand to read were A Brief Life or Conversation in The Cathedral. It had been a long time – over ten years – since I’d gone out with someone who had her own library.

When I stopped writing at twenty-four, I’d also left behind all of my literary relationships. La Negra didn’t read, except for the occasional advanced self-help book (Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay) or some treatise on Chinese medicine, which was her line of work. She had a contempt for bookish people that suited me perfectly. Early on, she’d taken an interest in my books. She’d found them in the little library in my bedroom one of the first times she’d stayed over. She was leafing through them, sitting on the bed. I took them out of her hands. I forbade her to read them. They didn’t represent me anymore. I was ashamed of them. I didn’t even know why I kept them. They were a product of my depression. They’re an affront to life, I think I even told her, and what we had between us was pure life. She was the first woman I was going to live with, and she was a mother, and I was in love, I felt positive for the first time in a long time.

In our first encounters she told me practically her entire love life. She’d started having sex very young, at thirteen, like it was a kind of game. In her family there was never a lot of fuss about bodies. Her father used to walk around the house in the buff like it was nothing. She’d always dated much older guys. She’d had two miscarriages, at sixteen and twenty-three, and she’d been in love with two men at the same time; they’d all lived together in Pajas Blancas. One of them had left on the verge of going crazy, and with the one who stayed, the one she’d soon have to leave, she’d had Yamila. I didn’t ask for details about any of that. I didn’t ask if the three of them slept together or if they took turns, and she didn’t tell me. It was a boundary she set in her own story, to protect me, and it was for my own protection that I didn’t cross it. I didn’t have so much to tell, just that I’d debuted with a toothless whore in a brothel in Lautaro, in the south of Chile, on a trip I’d taken with the basketball team when I was seventeen. Before that, at fifteen, I’d sucked on my first little girlfriend’s tits. Afterwards, I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and the next day I’d apologised for having disrespected her: this image summed up how pathetic my adolescence had been. Later, when I was older, I’d had two important girlfriends, but more than anything I’d dedicated myself to sex for pleasure, once I’d got past the dark initial phase of excess. La Negra didn’t ask me what that excess had involved, and I didn’t explain. My nocturnal, cocaine-fuelled excursions in Montevideo seemed too distant, and not simply because they were far in the past. Even at the time, they had already seemed far away. While they were happening, it was as if they were happening to someone else, and I’d never felt the need to share them with anyone. I also didn’t tell La Negra about any of that because it revealed a sexuality that was sad and turbulent and superficial compared to hers.

It was only four years later, during the final period of our living together, when I’d found myself with the urge to take up writing again. I’d stay in the living room after dinner with a notebook, my tobacco and a thermos full of tea. It didn’t take long for La Negra to start complaining. She didn’t like it when I stayed up writing. To my utter shock, the reason – when I asked for one – was that sometimes Yamila got up at night to go to the bathroom. La Negra didn’t want me to be there, didn’t want me to see her daughter half asleep, in her underwear. Yamila was thirteen years old then. She was developing quickly, but she was still a child. I asked La Negra what she was afraid of. What did she think I was capable of doing to her daughter? She didn’t reply with words. She looked at me with hatred and shame. I wasn’t willing to stop writing, and again writing saved me, this time springing me from the cage of a relationship that had been collapsing for ages.

When I told La Negra I’d met someone, she didn’t get upset. All she did was suggest I hold off on introducing her to the kids until I was one hundred per cent sure it was something serious. As it happened, I never did introduce them, though I considered it. A little surprised at herself, Clara went on the pill. She’d gone some time without a stable relationship and without any intention of having one. We didn’t make any long-term plans, but we saw each other a lot. Clara would have liked to meet the boys, and I thought it could have a soothing effect on them; sometimes they worried because they thought I was lonely.

‘Do you have fun when you’re home alone?’ they’d ask me.

During the first phase we’d slept together practically every night, at her house or mine. Wednesday morning, when we were both free, we’d walk to the estuary. Later on, when I was with La Negra – sometimes the very same day – I felt spacious, overflowing, unattainable. The more I fucked, the more I felt like fucking. I developed the shoulders of a gym rat. Now that I was on a roll, I also reclaimed the night. I returned to downtown Montevideo, to certain bars where friends had told me that my reputation had gained me a cult following. People remarked on how good I looked and asked me what my secret was. I told them the truth: sex, a lot of sex, and they laughed as if I’d cracked a joke.

Then, at the beginning of last December, just two months before Alejandro died, like an idiot I fell in love with La Negra all over again. All my desire, suddenly and exclusively, came to focus on her. The feeling was so strong that it forced me to end my relationship with Clara. Clara is going to look at me in utter surprise when I tell her what’s happening to me. She’d had feelings for other people during all our time together, too, but it hadn’t made her want to break things off with me. That’s how couples work. For the first time in the past ten, almost eleven months, I sensed that Clara secretly hoped our relationship would work out. Something told me that by leaving her, I was closing the door to normalcy forever. Mornings with her were nice. Sex, coffee, reading the newspaper. When she saw there was nothing I could do to change my feelings, she swallowed her sadness. Somehow she always knew she stood to lose – after all, La Negra was the mother of my children.

‘After all, she’s the mother of my soul,’ I would correct her, as if there was even the slightest possibility she would understand me.

The feeling will take me completely by surprise. It will gestate over four, five days and then attack me, leaving me utterly perplexed. One of the mornings when I go by early to take the boys to school, while we have breakfast and help them get dressed, La Negra won’t draw out the moment when we hand off the mate in a caress. Then she’s going to freeze when I brush her hip as she waits for the bread to toast. Then, when I tell her that after I drop the kids off at school I’ll come back for a little visit with her, she’ll reply that we’d better leave it for another time, today she’s got some terrible premenstrual cramps. I’ll call her later that same day to see how she is and to wish her good night.

The next day I’ll send her a message telling her how much I miss her body and that I’ve had several ideas for our next encounter, a message she won’t answer until the next morning. Thursday or Friday morning I again suggest a visit, but she’s bleeding oceans and it’s not like it was at the beginning; she doesn’t let me touch her when she’s on her period. On Saturday I invite her to come over at night, but Yamila (fifteen) is planning a party at the house with her school friends and La Negra has to be there. The next time I take Paco and Juan to school it will once again be impossible for us to meet: she has an appointment at the social security offices at ten. In each of her negatives I’ll perceive a kind of deep-rooted regret, and I’m going to assume that La Negra is developing feelings for me, that she’d like to get back together and it hurts to have to share me with Clara, only she doesn’t know how to tell me.

I will have already talked to Clara the morning when I catch La Negra in the kitchen and tell her how I feel. When I tell her I want to get back together, she will stiffen. I don’t care how hard it’s going to be to patch things up and forgive each other completely, I’ll tell her. I’m willing to talk for as many hours as we need to talk and to cover every possible point. She’s going to look at me suspiciously. It’s going to seem too radical to her. Love is radical, I’ll reply.

‘You broke up with Clara without knowing what was going on with me?’

I couldn’t be with her anymore. Whether or not our relationship works, I don’t want to touch another woman. I couldn’t.

I’m going to insist. She’ll ask for time. She needs to look inside herself, she has a lot of things to consider, it’s all too sudden. When I tell her that I love her, she’s going to peer at me as if there were something to interpret. I won’t stop telling her, so she’ll see how sure I am. I’ll send her two or three messages a day: telling her about something nice I’m doing with the kids, or about something Paco did, something Juan said. Messages saying, You remember the time when this or that? and I’ll get more and more enthusiastic. Every day that La Negra takes to reflect speaks to the seriousness of our situation, how open our wounds are, and I’m going to respect her caution. I’m going to prepare, I’m going to remember our story, searching for keys and clues that will help us repair everything that’s broken. I’m going to regret, for starters, having relegated her to the role of a lover for all this time. I’m going to try to console myself with the idea that we’ve already gone through everything. What was left to us but to accept, once and for all, that life had put each of us in the other’s path? I’m going to thank heaven for the renewed assault of this feeling, the sudden, luminous, poetic course of my life. I’m going to think of the boys’ happiness; they’re so little that they’ll probably end up forgetting the couple of years when their parents were separated.

And one afternoon, burning with desire to see her, I’m going to go by without calling first, at the time when she usually comes home after collecting the boys from school, and I’m going to find out that she’s not there. Yamila will have picked up Paco and Juan and walked them home. It’s Yamila who will be making some pasta for lunch. Apparently, her mother has had to go to Montevideo on some urgent errands and it’s unclear when she’ll be back. While Yamila finishes cooking lunch, I’m going to go outside with Paco and Juan to watch them ride their bikes around the triangular plaza across from the house. It will be a sunny, spring-like day, and my impatience will start to grow. It’s almost time to go back to work and I don’t like the idea of the boys being alone with only their sister looking after them, and I can’t stop looking at my watch and staring at the end of the track where La Negra will have to appear after she gets off the bus.

Around that corner, eventually, comes a white pickup with its headlights on. At first I think it’s a police truck. Some metres before it reaches the fork at the little plaza, the truck stops and sits motionless for several seconds. I don’t know how I know, but La Negra is in that truck. I know that when she saw me in the street she asked the guy at the wheel to stop, and I know that she’s just spent the night with that guy. She’s explaining the situation to him; she’s explaining who I am. Then, the pickup, in no hurry, turns onto her street and stops at the driveway. I cross the plaza to watch her get out of the passenger side: she meets my eyes as I walk. I look into the truck’s open window, and I’m met by the stink of cigarettes and alcohol. Fabricio, a fat man with the look of a mechanic, introduces himself and shakes my hand, and then he says goodbye to La Negra. Talk later, he says.

At that moment, the boys will have dropped their bikes and come to greet their mother; they’ll trail behind her as she goes in the front door without paying them the slightest attention. I’ll wait for La Negra to come out of the bathroom while Yamila makes Paco and Juan eat.

Outside, as we sit in two plastic chairs, she’s going to tell me about Fabricio with a cigarette in her hand. La Negra isn’t a smoker. She smokes blonde rolling tobacco on special occasions, for short periods. She smoked when I met her. One cigarette could last her an eternity. She smoked it in deep concentration, taking pleasure from it but also, it seemed to me, as though consulting an oracle. That afternoon, after exhaling several mouthfuls of smoke, searching for the appropriate words, the proper tone, she’ll tell me that with Fabricio she has the chance to experience something new. That’s why she couldn’t make up her mind whether to tell me about him, because of the newness and fragility of this thing she didn’t know the name of, only that it isn’t a silly love, a romantic love. Since I don’t quite know what she means by that, she’ll be forced to explain. I look at her mouth, and she sees me looking at it. She’d put on red lipstick in the bathroom, but it doesn’t help at all. You can still tell where she was.

‘What you feel for me is romantic love,’ she’ll say, covering her lips with her cigarette hand. ‘It’s not mature love. It’s not real love.’

My vertigo will keep me from saying much. I can only ask her if she’s already made the decision to stay with this Fabricio, if there isn’t any chance she’ll change her mind.

He was grey. La Negra was going to be with a fat grey guy. I go from sitting in my chair to kneeling on the ground. Then I slide down until I’m like a bracket against the wall. Then I gather the last of my strength to cross the dining room, and I end up stretched out on Juan’s little bed.

I’m going to smoke more than I’ve ever smoked in my life during the weeks that follow, wondering what the fuck is happening. How can it be that I’ve lost her just when it seemed everything was miraculously falling into place? How can it be that after having lost her, my love for her doesn’t diminish, but actually intensifies to levels I never would have thought possible? What evil spell has made me fall in love with her for the second time right as she’s starting to go out with that fat arsehole?

I won’t set foot in her house again during the few remaining days of school. The boys’ holidays begin in the second half of December. She’ll bring them to stay with me until Christmas, but she won’t show up alone. She’s going to come in Fabricio’s truck with Fabricio, who’s going to stay in the driver’s seat with the engine running while I receive the kids in the doorway and she hands me a bag with their things. I’m going to call her several times while I’m with the boys, but La Negra isn’t going to pick up or answer my messages no matter how long I wait, lying on the bed with the phone on my chest, checking it every once in a while even though it hasn’t rung or vibrated. On Christmas Eve she’s going to send a very short text wishing us a merry Christmas and letting me know that she’ll come to collect them on the 27th. She’ll stay silent when I reply, almost immediately, that we owe ourselves one last conversation, so we can lay all our cards on the table.

Paco is going to find me crying several times when he wakes up. He’s going to ask me why I’m crying, then whether I’m crying for Mum. I’m going to tell him half the truth: that I’m crying for his mother and that he shouldn’t worry, that I’ll get over it.

I won’t want to get over it. My love may be a childish love, it may be pure possessiveness, but it’s untameable. It may be a bitter love, but it’s also very sweet. The heart brought back to life after so long. The heart beating, flooded with an objectless love. I’m going to tend that love to keep it from waning. I’m going to worry about the day when that love will scatter like sand over the rest of the objects in the world. I’m going to try to silence my mind, which will teem with images of La Negra and fat Fabricio. I’m going to try. In the worst one, I see her having an orgasm and telling the fat muppet: take it, take it. That’s what she used to say when she had an orgasm: take it. As if she were the one who was ejaculating. She must have said it to Yamila’s father, too, and she must be saying it to the fat guy now. I don’t think she inaugurated that habit with me. I never wanted to find out.

I’ll also have images of us in old age, back together again, humiliated by time. Images of the two of us sitting there, remembering the past, reflecting on the winding path of our relationship. When I think that La Negra is an idiot for not returning my messages or calls, when I think about stopping by the fat bastard’s house one day and beating the shit out of him in front of my kids, it’s going to seem like those thoughts are of a lesser quality than the feelings my heart produces – feelings full of radiant energy. I’m going to feel split in two, mind and heart: the heart joyful, given over to its favourite activity, capable of limitless feeling; the mind irritated and at war. I’m going to tell myself that I have to trust my heart and give it free reign. I’m going to talk to my mind so it will submit to my heart. I’m going to tell it: Mind, stay in your place; Mind, don’t be afraid.

Even though we don’t have sex anymore, Clara still visits me. Now that the boys are on holiday and I have them with me, she texts before coming over. She’ll come by at eleven at night, when Paco and Juan are already in bed. We go out back to smoke, sitting in the grass or on a couple of folding chairs. I tell her things I never told anyone about La Negra; I tell her about the jealousy that ate away at us, and she doesn’t judge me or console me. She just clicks her tongue at certain moments of my story. A couple of times she’s going to suggest that we sleep together, invoking the idea that one nail drives out another, and one of those times I accept. I let her suck me off there outside, under the stars. I look at her, and she’s beautiful and feels splendid. She smiles at me, showing me that sensual gap between her front teeth, but she only gets me to half-mast.

‘You’re too cerebral,’ she tells me after a while.

That night she stays over. Depressed by her presence in my bed, which is nothing but a symbol of La Negra’s absence, I end up kicking her out in the early morning.

She and Alejandro are the only ones I talk to about the matter. With Alejandro when he calls from Santa Teresa on New Year’s, which I’m going to spend at home. He’s going to ask me about the boys and how things are going with Mum and Dad, who say I’ve been very aggressive lately, and I’m going to tell him about La Negra, who has just moved in with the fat wanker, in Shangrilá of all places, and I’m going to talk to him about the mind and the heart. Ale is going to ask me to be more patient with our parents, and he’s going to say that the best thing that could have happened is for Brenda to find another guy, even if it doesn’t seem that way now.

‘Don’t forget about everything that happened,’ he’ll tell me. ‘Don’t forget how badly you ended it. Remember how hard it was for you to get back on your feet.’

Then he’ll tell me about the girls he’s been hooking up with – five, though the season hasn’t technically even started yet – and about a technique he’s developed, the technique of dick rays and pussy rays. The technique consists of looking at the girl with your eyes but also with your dick. You have to feel like you’ve got a ray coming out of your dick that goes into the girl’s pussy. It works. Even if the girl isn’t looking at you, even if she’s laying down sunbathing and looking in another direction, at some point she starts to feel it and she ends up turning toward you; and if the girl is into it, she starts sending you pussy rays. ‘Really, I learned the technique from the girls’, says Ale, ‘from feeling their pussy rays while I was lifeguarding at the beach. Once it’s established that there’s a back and forth between dick rays and pussy rays, all the work is done. You go over to her, you say hi how’s things, and you’re good for the night.’

‘Forget about Brenda,’ he told me. ‘And stop calling her La Negra. It’s too intimate, you’ll never be totally separated that way. And open a Facebook account, it’s perfect for hooking up. Facebook is perfect for dick rays.’

Our last phone conversation will be on 6th January, which Ale is going to take off work so he can visit the family. No one knows, of course, but it will be the last time Alejandro sets foot in our parents’ house. I’ll be the only one who doesn’t go – partly because of the heat, which means taking the kids on the bus will be absolute torture, and partly because I’ll be too caught up with the problems in my personal life.

During that time, I’ll be spending all my energy on finding some way to get the answers I need to keep me from exploding into a thousand pieces, or at least so that Paco and Juan’s day-to-day isn’t miserable, weighed down by their sad, exhausted, absent father. During that time I will have reached the conclusion that, at thirty-seven years old, I don’t know myself in the slightest. Mine though they may be, I don’t know what to do with my mind or my heart, each fighting a battle for itself alone. And my body: it bears up like a beaten animal under the tobacco and the insomnia and my erratic eating, but things can’t go on like that forever. I always go to bed past three in the morning after masturbating to pornography in the living room, the computer’s volume down as low as possible while the boys sleep on the other side of the wall. The page I always left for last had a category of videos starring amateur chicks, women of all ages willing to do anything for a little cash, faces worn down to the skull by poverty or addiction, and every video followed the same procedure. They started with the woman sitting on a torn sofa and the voice of a guy off-camera asking her what her name was, what she did for a living, how many guys she’d been with, if she liked to be fucked like an animal. At some point the guy would pretend to get bored with the protocol and he’d ask her to take her clothes off. While the girl undressed, the guy would tell her how ugly she was. They were ordinary women’s bodies, most pretty run-down, with small or saggy breasts, paunchy stomachs, fat knees, cellulitis. The guy would criticise her arsehole, her legs, and he’d warn her she was going to feel like she’d been hit by a train. Then another guy would come out from behind the camera, his dick hard, arms tattooed, and he’d put the girl on her knees and start to mouth-fuck her. He’d grab her by the ears or the back of her neck with one hand and her throat with the other, and he’d give her one thrust after another while the other guy, who’d never appear, would encourage him to put it all in, to destroy her face. Sometimes, if the girl started to suffer and try to get away, a third guy would emerge to hold her arms behind her back. They’d let her breathe for a couple of seconds and the girl would pant, dripping slobber, her eyeliner all smeared. I’d go to sleep and have nightmares, Brenda’s face mixing with the women’s faces in the videos. I’d get up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit; I had a pain in the back of my neck that only lessened when I lay on my back with my legs up. One of those early mornings, I extracted a single thought from the tumult in my head: I need help. And then: I need to look where I haven’t looked yet, I have to find some order in all this. And the next day I’ll take Paco and Juan to the Tienda Inglesa so they can play in the ball pit and eat nuggets with chips and I’ll go and buy a notebook. I’m going to start writing down my dreams.

The notebook, Papelaria brand, has a hard cover and a drawing of a woman on the front. Pale skin, almond eyes, her peacock-hued hair flows down the notebook’s spine and spills onto the back cover. Although I quit pornography for good and cut down on my masturbation, the plan doesn’t work immediately. The first nights I toss and turn in bed, smoking, looking at the notebook on the nightstand, going into the boys’ room to make sure the mosquitos aren’t biting them. Toward the end of the month, on 29th January, when I’ve already practically forgotten about the dream journal, I’ll have my first dream. I’ll get up right away to write it down: I’m at a party thrown by rich people, in a mansion, and I’m there because I won a raffle. I walk through the rooms, and people greet me with sardonic smiles. Finally, I manage to slip away. I go through some tall doors and find a crowd of people on the other side, some of them waiting to get in, others seemingly waiting for someone famous to come out so they can take a photo. No sooner do I get out the door than I’m being hugged by Ricardo, a friend I’ve barely seen for the past fifteen years, ever since he moved to Barcelona; he pulls me into his car. Ricardo had been my best friend when I was starting out as a writer. He was five years older than me, the same height as me but twice as wide and twice as agile, and when I met him he’d already published two unclassifiable books. They were a schizophrenic cocktail of Boris Vian, Lautrémont and Nick Cave, all mixed with a lot of whisky and insomniac nights, and a play he’d written had won a municipal prize. Where he was incredibly chaotic and garrulous, I, in comparison, was chaotic and silent. Ricardo had had a Dante-esque childhood and still had visions in the middle of the day, visions of rivers of blood and devastated cities. His apartment was a pigsty, the whole place littered with books, magazines and wrappers you had to clear away before you could sit and talk, and the bathroom was all sticky, but the guy, even with that impossible head of his, had taken care of himself since before he’d come of age, and I trusted him more than anyone. I still lived with my parents, and I’d just written Mosh, my first novel. After I’d abandoned Mormonism, the world had become so complex so quickly that for moments at a time I literally saw everything as a blur. Our conversations mainly consisted of Ricardo’s monologues, which I received with rapt attention. Ricardo fed me information about what it meant to be an artist, to be a writer, to be a man. He lent me videos and detective novels. I was a personal project of his. He tried to orient me with his endless knowledge about art and artist myths, and he related episodes of his childhood and adolescence that were so much more extreme than mine, so much more explicit, and I absorbed his words, learned from his way of seeing things. He immediately became the first reader of my manuscripts. He almost always hit the nail on the head.

In the dream, his car is red and some of the bodywork is missing. You can see part of the motor and one of the doors is gone, but all of the brokenness is on purpose, like clothing that’s intentionally ripped when you buy it. Inside the car there’s a boy and his father. The father is driving, the boy is riding in the passenger seat. The boy asks Ricardo, who is next to me, where he got the car. Before Ricardo can say anything, I interrupt him. I talk to Ricardo as if the boy can’t hear me: tell him it’s a fake car. Tell him I gave it to you, that my beloved’s life is in danger. Meanwhile, we drive away from the party down a night-time street.

I’ll find all kinds of meaning in the dream, but I don’t study it deeply. It’s enough that I’d had a dream in which Brenda didn’t appear, and that I’d had the resolve to get up and write it down. I’ll want to protect the energy that comes from this small success.

I’m going to dream again on the night of 30th January, again about a party, a kind of carnival I attend with a young girl who looks a lot like Natalia Oreiro. It’s in the grounds of a school, with tables and chairs and benches. My brother Marcos is lying in the grass, talking to an Asian guy I’ve never seen, but they seem to have been friends for a long time. They don’t see me, but I can hear them talking about my dream journal. The Asian guy says scornfully that he can only understand a person keeping a dream journal if he’s writing about real dreams, not just any old dreams. It’s growing dark and I lose sight of the girl I came with, and I find myself with a much older woman sitting on a swing. I sit beside her on the other swing. She’s cold and I kiss her, and then I’m in a bathroom with showers; the woman from the swing gets in the shower with me. Meanwhile, I know that the girl is looking for me. She’s a dancer and her show is about to start, and now her voice reaches me from somewhere, asking where I am. A security guard comes running into the bathroom, and as soon as he sees me, I’ve disappeared, I’m eating a sandwich in the middle of the playground, my hair dry, as if nothing had happened. It seems that I’m a famous actor, and people turn to look at me when I go into a warehouse set up for the show that features the girl I’ve come with. There’s a net hanging halfway up to the ceiling, a tubular net like the ones they use to display balls at sporting goods stores, and a crowd of bodies squirm in it like worms; dancers walk over the bodies on their way to join them at the still empty end of the net. I can’t find the girl, but some of the other dancers frown disapprovingly when they realise I’m looking for her. I go to a section of the stage that’s like a house of mirrors where a thousand things are happening at once, and when I turn the corner I see her, or at least that’s what my face expresses in the mirror; for a moment, that’s the only thing I see – my face in the mirror. I turn the corner and see my profile, my actor’s profile, my shoulders bare, and when I see the girl I smile in a way that tells me she still hasn’t seen me.

In the dream I have on the night of 3rd February, I’m at my brother Marcos’s wedding and everything goes badly. With a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival playing in the background, two naked men emerge from a pool, their dicks hard, and they stand there looking around at everyone and pointing their erections at us. My cousins and maternal uncles are disguised as Egyptians, apparently at my suggestion. My mother gets angry and some of them crouch down in the hallway, hiding their heads. Then I see Bernardo, who used to be my PE teacher in secondary school, and I avoid him by pretending I’m sleepwalking. There’s an Indian actor who shoots at some glass walls that don’t shatter when the bullets hit them. The rumour spreads that one of the guests at the party is a thief and is planning to steal something, but no one knows who it is or what he wants to steal, and we’re all on guard. The Indian actor is leading the investigation and at a certain point he captures a young couple, who fight back. He wraps them in a kind of blue nylon bag that grows on its own and closes over the length of their bodies, like a cocoon.

The night of 8th February, a few hours before Alejandro returns to the nothing from whence he came, we’ll have a long and wide-ranging conversation about survival – my dad, Marcos, Maca, Mariela, and Mauro. After ploughing through an order of mozzarella and farinata, we’ll take our coffee out to the porch while Mum makes up the beds in what used to be my room. It might seem like a coincidence that we’d choose this very subject on the night Ale was going to die on us, but the truth is we always talked about survival when we got together, if my father was there: survival, the annihilation of the human race and the stupidity of the human species.

At first, it had always been Dad who insisted on starting those conversations. We ascribed it in part to the start of the new millennium, but especially to the fact that Dad was becoming a generic old man, seeing destruction and conspiracy everywhere he looked. Little by little, though, it seemed the world had decided to prove him right. After a while there was no need for anyone to even mention some disaster pulled from the pages of the news; we’d just launch straight into a rant against the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds and all the rest of the world’s pricks. Bankers, masons, politicians, Zionists – no one was safe.