This Too Shall Pass Read online

  He looks at me with a puzzled expression.

  —Don’t tell me you believe in horoscopes.

  —No, not really. I just wanted to know so I can give you a new pair of espadrilles.

  He looks at his feet and wiggles his big toe.

  —But these are perfect, he says, blushing a little. —They’re air-conditioned.

  —Oh? Let me give them a try. Suddenly I’m back in the game, where I feel more comfortable and sure of myself, a much less trivial place than people give it credit for; the most dazzling certainties of my life have come precisely while I was messing around. He removes an espadrille hesitatingly and places it in front of me. I submerge my foot in the huge shoe, nearly the size of a small life raft, and feel the straw sole hard and dry underneath, and the stiff, sea salt–stained navy canvas rubbing against my instep. —A perfect fit, I say, wiggling the red nail of my big toe, which looks as out of place there as a clown’s nose in the middle of a washed face. —I think I’ll keep them.

  —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 athle
te, 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?

  I start laughing. —How old we’ve become! Imagine us twenty years from now. We’re just getting started on our new old age, but it’s still a joke, a distant shadow.

  —Meaning we’re not going to sleep together.

  He bites my neck softly.

  —I think what I really need is a friend.

  —You already know how dreadful I am at that.

  We both laugh.

  —Yeah, well. I’m not particularly good at it either. But we stay cuddling each other for a while…I feel that cloudy and somewhat painful kind of exhaustion from the day convalescing in bed, the vague and persistent sorrow that permeates everything since you died, that I try to shuffle off but whose particles always come back to fall in exactly the same spot.

  Nacho hugs me tightly, like a little boy holding a stuffed toy, but I feel his body still tense and anxious. I know he won’t go to sleep as long as there is a speck of poison left in the house.

  —It’s time to go. It’s very late, I say, freeing him.

  He accompanies me to the door and takes my face into his hands and kisses me like he did a thousand years ago, when we were other people, his Don Quixote silhouette cut out against the threshold.r />
  —Take care of yourself, little one. It’s cold out there.

  —

  It’s cooled down and there is a light gray, milky haze blurring the contours of things, which is going to turn pink and then orange shortly. Dawn is set to break soon—I must have been at the party for three or four hours. The music trails me awhile until all I hear are my own footsteps falling on the gray slate, and the chatter of night birds. I don’t want to go to sleep yet, I think I’ll head down to the beach and watch the sunrise alone for once. Though like so many other things, maybe sunrises only acquire their true sense of triumph and redemption while in silent company. Instead of heading toward the sea, though, I begin walking up the mountain, following a maze of narrow, pebbled alleys that seem like passageways, and the line of walls built from stacked stones, magnificent ancient puzzles that never collapse, marking the edge of vegetable gardens and olive fields, where cats doze and watch over the town by day. I come across a child’s shoe left atop one of the walls. My boys will be waking up in a little while, they’re my own private spectacle of dreams and dawns, Edgar silent and meditative, who drags along with him the vestiges of night long into the day, like me, and Nico, who rushes straight into the new day decisively, gushing and cheerful. My legs feel heavy like they do in some of my nightmares but I don’t stop. I drink in the day’s new, unspoiled air and tell myself that tomorrow I’ll stop smoking, as I slowly continue climbing the hill to the dirt esplanade, with its two rickety trees, that serves as the campground parking lot. I used to come here often when I was young; I had an Italian friend who used to make me spaghetti with tomato sauce there, on an outdoor stove. I’ve forgotten his name, as I have the majority of the main characters of those bright and blissful summers when we soared above the town and the world, young people overflowing with euphoria and arrogance, so full of passion, so carefree. An old man crosses the campground carrying a pail in his hand, and nods to me before disappearing into the small pavilion where the showers are. I must be a sorry sight right now; if the bar were open I would have a coffee and wash my face, but it’s still too early, the gray building is closed and dark. I continue walking until I catch sight of the hermitage, whose whitewashed walls are blanching, and there stand the two black cypress trees like solemn and benevolent guardians at either side of the cemetery. And here I am, I made it to the end of the yellow brick road. Despite the fatigue, my heart is beating hard; my hands are freezing and they begin to tremble. There was a crowd of people last time I was here, and the living outnumbered the dead, we were in the majority, and my friends were with me. I fantasized about what it would be like to come here on my own. I imagined myself walking up the hill, serene and philosophical, already healed, maybe holding some wildflower in my hand that I had picked along the path. I look at the huge door, its dark, knotted wood, and stroke the heavy metal handle. I’m frightened, I’m weary, maybe it would be better to head home, get some sleep, take a rest, and come back at noon with someone else, or maybe not come back at all, maybe I’ll never come back, it’s a possibility. I push the door. It’s closed. But cemeteries aren’t supposed to close at night, I’ve seen a thousand horror films set in cemeteries at night. Surely it’s just me being clumsy, the door can’t possibly be locked. I push with my body against the door again, and work the heavy iron handle to no avail. I can’t catch my breath and suddenly I realize I’m crying. I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it, there’s a solution to every problem. I’ll call the mayor and ask him to come and open the door for me. I’ll climb the wall like Spider-Man. I’ll write a letter to the newspaper full of spit and vinegar. I’ll talk to Amnesty International. It can’t be possible that the door won’t open and that I can’t get in. I take a deep breath. I’ll do things the right way, without losing my temper, I’m sure everything will work itself out. I call at the door under my breath, “Mom, Mom,” quietly, and holding my ear up against the heavy wood. I think I hear something shuffling, like the sound of cat’s paws in the distance, but nobody comes to help me. I wiggle the heavy iron handle again and start banging on the door with all my strength, as if I were the one locked inside trying to get out, until the pain in my fists and the palms of my hands obliges me to stop. Feeling defeated and exhausted, I sit down on the bench at the hermitage’s door. The sun has come up without my noticing it. A clear, rosy light caresses the silver olive trees, turns the white walls to red, and the dew moistens the dirt roads imperceptibly. I’m as familiar with this particular light as if it were the call of a friend. I climb up onto the bench and peer over the wall, and catch sight of the field of olive trees and Port Lligat in the background, the small port where we used to keep the boat. That’s when I see her. Walking along the pier with her faded blue-checked shirt on top of her swimsuit, the beautiful brown legs that were always full of bruises, walking pigeon-toed with little girl’s sandals, glasses askew, a messy shock of hair sticking out from under a hat that’s dried out from the salt water, accompanied by her three dogs—Patum, Nana, and Luna, who are coming from a swim and joyfully on their way out to the boat. The surface of the sea is as still as a plate; the weather is glorious. Before going aboard, she turns around and smiles at me, saying: