Date: 2023-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; General; Literary; Psychological; Women; Hispanic & Latino; World Literature; Spain; 21St Century
Description: A thrilling metafiction about grief, the internet, and the difficulty of knowing others, The Voices of Adriana combines the psychological acuity of Marguerite Duras with the creative possibility of One Thousand and One Nights. Adriana has become obsessed with her father's online dating. Recently widowed, he's on a self-destructive, manic search for a partner to accompany him through his twilight years. At the same time, her life as an isolated grad student feels unreal, and to fill the void of her mother's death, Adriana begins writing, trying on different voices. She builds worlds from the on
Publisher: Two Lines Press

THE VOICES OF ADRIANA

Elvira Navarro

Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Originally published in Spanish as: Las voces de Adriana

Published in coordination with

Casanovas & Lynch Literary Agency, S. L.

Copyright © 2023 by Elvira Navarro

Translation copyright © 2025 by Christina MacSweeney

Two Lines Press
www.twolinespress.com

ISBN: 978-1-949641-73-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-949641-74-5

Cover design by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Photograph: Martin Beckett / Millennium Images, UK

Photograph: Katya Evdokimova / Millennium Images, UK

Photograph: MICHEL MAZZONI / Millennium Images, UK

Photograph: Joseph Reid / Millennium Images, UK

Photograph: Kristina Hruska / Millennium Images, UK

Typeset by Wengrow

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Navarro, Elvira, 1978- author. | MacSweeney, Christina, translator. Title: The voices of Adriana / Elvira Navarro ; translation, Christina MacSweeney. Other titles: Voces de Adriana. English Identifiers: LCCN 2024021590 (print) | LCCN 2024021591 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949641738 (paperback) | ISBN 9781949641745 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. Classification: LCC PQ6714.A827 V6313 2023 (print) | LCC PQ6714.A827 (ebook) | DDC 863/.7--dc23/eng/20240508

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024021590

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024021591

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This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Also by Elvira Navarro from Two Lines Press

A WORKING WOMAN

RABBIT ISLAND

for Rubén

CONTENTS

1. I. THE FATHER
2. II. THE HOUSE
3. III. THE VOICES

I.

THE

FATHER

When she was working, Adriana opened Twitter every half hour. There was rarely anything interesting. But even if she only took a quick look, as if skimming the timeline was a sort of reflex action, she’d sometimes find a tweet that seemed to be a response to her own thoughts; so, for example, one morning when she was reflecting on her father’s illness, she came across: “Death stalks your whole life. You can’t escape it. Why not become its apprentice?” It was an advertisement for a video game in which death has an apprentice. She clicked on the link to view the cover. The Grim Reaper, with the look of a pissed-off pixie, carried a gleaming scythe and was surrounded by zombie-like, blue spirits with sunken eyes. In those images, the spirit and putrid flesh merged in an agreeable sort of way. Putrefaction of the body continued into the Other World, where it makes no sense.

The body has meaning only in the world of the living. For some months, Adriana had been wondering how best to deal with her father, who was mistreating his body through indolence. Should she make him restart his rehabilitation and nag him about the dangers of smoking, or just leave him in peace?

Her father refused to walk and smoked almost two packs of Virginia blend a day. Maybe he was asking her to be the apprentice of his death, and being a good daughter meant doing just that: allowing him to sit in his armchair, killing himself with nicotine. When you came down to it, she was the one who wanted him to recover, to live on for many years and regain the use of his legs. She had no desire to be left fatherless because, without him, she’d have no close family. But she didn’t want him to become dependent either, since that would be a drag for them both. Should she bring him to live with her or leave him in the hands of a caregiver? She didn’t know.

And then again, who was she to be making him behave in a particular way? She’d always found the sight of adults treating their parents like children annoying. If he chain-smoked forty a day and watched ten hours of TV, it wasn’t because he was trying to kill himself. That was Adriana’s interpretation. He was simply enjoying life in his own way, and comfort had always been a priority for him. Well, not his only priority. Before the stroke, comfort had been on par with service to others. His generosity was unbounded. But now, doing favors had become a chore. Just moving was difficult. Having never before had any serious health issues, her father’s body was now suffering, had become his enemy. He got around with the help of a walker, but even that required effort; the loss of muscle mass and coordination after a hip replacement and the embolism meant his legs didn’t work properly. Instead, he used the muscles in his trunk, which caused his back to ache. He also had pain in his feet and difficulty swallowing. When she “made” (That verb again!) him go for a stroll, he’d stop every five minutes to rest on the seat of the walker, light a cigarette, and give her a look of unadulterated hatred. She was like a dog with a bone: “You have to walk”; “You have to restart your rehab”; “You have to stop smoking”; she’d insist. And then she’d immediately justify her words: “I’m only saying it for your own good.” That phrase, which her mother had constantly repeated and Adriana had detested, now issued from her lips far too often. She’d become a vending machine of “I’m only saying it for your own good.” Her mother incarnate: the censor and the manipulator were invading her, like in some movie about diabolic possession. But who knows what is best for others? Look how many young people, bursting with clean air, exercise, and salad, die of cancer.

The idea that her father’s death would precede hers was a supposition based on statistics that didn’t apply to her own family. Her thoroughly healthy mother had been taken by lymphoma not long ago. Her great-grandfather had died in his nineties, having been a lifelong smoker of Ducados and cigars. Her two paternal aunts went on smoking Marlboros after being diagnosed with malignant breast tumors and, now in their eighties, still smoked, while a cousin who was a nun of celestially pure habits had gone to the other world at the age of thirty-nine. And the exceptions weren’t just in her family. The oldest woman in the world had lived to a hundred and twenty-two and only gave up tobacco on reaching her hundredth birthday; she’d gone blind and disliked having to ask for a light. Despite all that, Adriana would rant like a representative of WHO: “It’s been proven that smoking causes early death.” When she finished tormenting her desolate father with the healthy routine he didn’t follow, she’d beat herself up about tormenting him for no good reason. It seemed like there was only one thing she venerated in life: provoking guilt; first in others and then, as penance, in herself.

After the stroke, her father spent twenty-seven hours lying on the floor with an electric brazier scorching the edge of a cushion. He eventually managed to get to the landline and dial the only number that came into his head—surprisingly, a sister-in-law’s. It was a miracle he was still alive, not only because he’d lain there for so long with no one to help; the cushion could have caught fire so easily. But the consequences of the stroke had already been kindled. He arrived at the hospital with one leg, one arm, and half his face paralyzed. He had no memory of those twenty-seven hours on the cold terrazzo floor, his only protection the valance of the table under which the electric brazier was burning. She thought it paradoxical that the heater, which could have killed him if it had ignited the cushion, had in the end saved him from hypothermia. Even in Valencia, that January had been exceptionally cold; there was snow, although it didn’t stick, and it was freezing inside the thick-walled house.

The arterial obstruction affected only the right hemisphere of his brain and he hadn’t lost his speech. He spent three months in a nursing home, until he was able to stand on his own two feet again. Adriana went to see him every weekend. She took the same train by which, for fifteen years, she’d traveled to visit her family. But never, in all that time, had she noticed a sign overhead that read “Help Window.” When her father became ill, that “help” suddenly stood out clearly like a reflection of her own SOS. Help! The word was outlined against the clouds, against the wide, open firmament. The small window was begging the sky for assistance or indicating that the path to salvation was up above, beyond this world.

When her mother died, people said she’d been orphaned, which had seemed an exaggeration. She associated the word with young children or adolescents, with early bereavement and orphanages. But when her mother was buried, Adriana had already turned thirty. She was an adult and her mother had been ill for some time: death came as a release. Yet after her father’s stroke, she felt fear, suddenly experiencing the orphanhood she’d once thought inappropriate for her age. When children start to become their parents’ parents, is that also the start of being absolutely alone? Logically, she knew this wasn’t the case, but in her heart there was an intuition of the rupture. Would her father soon die? She still remembered the hot May afternoon when her mother revealed that she had cancer. Although the doctors had given her reasons to hope, Adriana was certain she wasn’t going to pull through. Later she knew that wasn’t due to any form of sixth sense, but to the discovery of her own finite existence, seen at close quarters in the woman who had given birth to her. Adriana was the flesh of her flesh and wouldn’t be here forever: she was only able to accept that statement of the obvious when her mother showed her the exit route. It had been the last lesson she’d given Adriana.

In relation to her father, on the other hand, she had no certainty, no presentiment. She didn’t know whether that embolic stroke would be followed by others, or if he’d go on living for another twenty years in a fog of smoke, puffing on one cigarette after another. Nor did she know what the lesson would be this time, if there was one. She didn’t believe in cosmic forces conspiring to educate errant humans, but it seemed absurd not to learn anything. It was like those tweets that seemed to be responses to her own thoughts, even when they weren’t. Another of them, “Death is mistreatment for addicts of narrative,” had buzzed around in her head because it was an ingenious way of saying what we all know: death’s a fucker.

They soon fell into a routine. She’d arrive at the home on Friday evening, accompany him to the dining room, sit with him while he ate, and then help him to wash and get into his pajamas. Then she’d return to the family apartment, where she’d lived permanently until the age of eighteen and visited every six weeks thereafter. She’d walk through the rooms and open the empty fridge. There was nothing to stop her from buying a few things to keep there from one week to the next—yogurt and eggs, for instance—but she liked observing the strange solitariness of the apartment, leaving no trace of her stay there. She’d spend the whole of Saturday with her father, taking him out in a wheelchair and sitting with him in a horchatería. There were sometimes visits from friends, her two paternal aunts from Alicante, and one or two nieces; his meager social life was restricted to weekends as he hardly ever spoke to the other retirees. Playing the part of an old man frightened him. “I’m in my thirties,” he’d say, “but my body is older.” She’d imagine him on weekdays, alone, bored but patient, with a trace of unhappiness, a smidgeon of hopelessness—very unusual in a man who had never been hopeless or sad for any length of time.

He’d always been optimistic, tolerant, capable of communicating peace and joy. Her father had great, boundless strength, but his happiness dwindled in that old folks’ home. Having to live with elderly people wrapped up in their own worlds, almost dead, at times gripped by spasms or trapped somewhere in the past, was too heavy a blow. He was different from them. There was no one to communicate with who didn’t have one foot in the grave, except for the staff, all those auxiliary nurses, doctors, and therapists he made friends with and who provided a degree of solace, even if it was relative since the relationships were unequal. They were there to do their jobs and her father was just another patient—admittedly a privileged one, as he wasn’t going to leave the home feet first; he’d be standing on them. And so the medics and support staff in charge of his rehabilitation went the extra mile for him.

Whenever she watched all those old people bunched together around the TV set in the lounge, Adriana would wonder if it made sense for the medical profession to always try to extend life, even when it meant that human beings spent their last years vegetating. Her answer was always the same: what did she know about the best time to die, about those old people’s circumstances, if it was a comfort for their offspring to see them or, in spite of it all, they preferred living like a part of the furniture to kicking the bucket?

He made an enormous effort to recover at least a minimum of mobility. He had some savings from a successful claim against Social Security related to the number of years he’d worked, but it only stretched to three months in that home, which was expensive because it offered daily rehab. So, despite the fact that he detested physical exertion, he battled to stand upright again. He didn’t miss a single exercise session and gave up smoking—not of his own free will, but because it was prohibited and, anyway, nobody would buy him cigarettes; the staff couldn’t be coaxed and the majority of the old people were past thinking of anything, least of all tobacco.

On Sundays, as a treat and to remove the taste of the bland, unsalted, puréed food, Adriana would prepare Bellota ham sandwiches and they’d picnic in the garden. Then they’d go to a horchatería and at seven she’d leave him in his room. Dragging her suitcase, she’d walk to the esplanade—the home was not far from Patacona—and then continue along the coast to Malvarrosa, where she’d take a bus.

Her father eventually managed to make friends with the only resident who didn’t resemble a soul in Purgatory; he wasn’t so very old and didn’t suffer from dementia. But he was deaf.

“Here’s my daughter,” her father would announce every Friday when she arrived.

“What?” the deaf man would reply.

“My daughter!”

“We’ve already met. How are you?”

The man would hold out his hand to Adriana and give a slight bow. He was able to get around quickly with a walker, as if he only had it to sit on when lining up. There were lines for everything: a line for meals, for the podiatrist—who saw to the feet that were hard as cannonballs or rocks—a line for the barber, for medical check-ups, for occupational therapy. He’d come there voluntarily to be with his wife, who had Alzheimer’s and died soon afterward, and then stayed on; he’d developed a liking for having his meals prepared and his room cleaned. What’s more, he could come and go as he pleased. And most importantly, nobody was bothered about him being deaf. He’d become a sort of host of Zombieland. He knew the name and room number of every resident, greeted them, did them favors and arranged parties, and, since he couldn’t hear, it wasn’t a problem that the old people rarely spoke or, when they did, talked nonsense. He and her father had improbable conversations that resounded through the dining room while the dentures of the other residents were clacking like castanets on their soup spoons. The deaf man exuded good humor; when she was on the train and saw the “Help Window” sign projected onto the whiter-than-white clouds, she’d think that color was like the hair of the deaf man and the other residents, and that the train ran through a pure form of senility with a stop at the nursing home, where her father invariably awaited her in a wheelchair, his body backlit against the curtains. He had a large room and the service was decent; as soon as he saw her, he’d pull himself up onto his spindly legs to demonstrate his prowess with the walker. Initially, he was only able to move around the room, but later his route extended into the corridor, until he could finally reach the dining room unassisted. And that was when he left the home.

Then came Vilma, an Ecuadoran woman who was his live-in caregiver during the week and was free on weekends, when Adriana took over. The situation was a strain on her father’s meager financial resources. The rehab wasn’t covered by his social benefits; Vilma, the private therapist, and everyday expenses continued to eat up his whole pension and what little was left from the claim against Social Security. They applied for a supplemental allowance but were turned down on the grounds that her father already had a good pension. That was true, yet it wasn’t enough to cover his expenses. The state took it for granted that everybody had someone willing to take responsibility for the care of a disabled person. What happened to those who didn’t?

He then quickly demonstrated that he was capable of living alone in the apartment, not due to any improvement in his mobility, but rather because it was his home, a space that was part of him; he’d lived there for three decades and it was in his bones. He never tripped because he knew the exact location of every loose tile and, without giving it a second thought, was careful not to walk on the kitchen floor when it had just been mopped. He could cope with the bathroom, his bed, and his shirt buttons, although the latter took him ten minutes to do up as one hand was still pretty much useless, as if permanently asleep or permanently just waking, willing to execute precise movements but frustrated in the attempt to grasp a teaspoon or fork. But so long as he didn’t insist on doing the impossible—or became accustomed to his limitations in doing everyday things like slicing bread or clipping his nails—everything panned out well. Even though he needed a walker, he could go to the bathroom without assistance, open even the lowest drawers in closets, and, unlike in the nursing home, had a slow but steady gait. Self-belief made him want to cope alone.

But Adriana refused to let him dispense with a caregiver, at least at first. On Fridays, when she arrived in Valencia to relieve Vilma, she’d issue him hyper-precise instructions about the habits he needed to acquire. On the third weekend, Vilma said:

“Your dad’s started smoking again.”

She waited until that night to catch him. When she smelled cigarette smoke coming from the open balcony window, she stormed into his bedroom and came close to waking the whole neighborhood. The next day she felt so miserable she thought she’d prefer to see him ignoring all the neurologist’s prohibitions—that is to say, she’d prefer him to have another cerebral stroke—than to remonstrate with him that way. She also stole a cigarette from him and, when he’d gone out for a walk, smoked it on the balcony, feeling guilty as hell. She’d only ever smoked when she was with friends or drinking, but after her father’s stroke she’d sworn never to touch tobacco again.

He was determined not to let his illness, the doctors, or even her get the better of him. Cigarettes weren’t the only prohibition he ignored. He very quickly began to use his car again. The neurologist had advised him not to drive until his coordination improved, but her father took out the Toyota one afternoon and began cruising euphorically around the city, with one useless hand that could scarcely grasp the steering wheel. And he also fired Vilma. Handing over the obligatory month’s pay, he said he didn’t need her services, he could do things for himself.

“That’s not what we agreed,” Adriana snapped. “Vilma was going to stay until I can take time off.”

“I don’t want my savings to run out. Teresa will come in two days a week and leave me food in the fridge. So I can let Vilma go, and that way I’ll have enough to see me through the month,” he replied, then added, “I don’t need anyone. I can take a shower without being watched over. I haven’t fallen since I got the stool.”

Teresa was their regular cleaner, and now she would have to cook as well. Adriana responded that if he wasn’t going the keep his promises (forgetting that she was the one who had made him promise; that terrifying word “made” again!), then she wouldn’t stay with him over the summer. Nevertheless, when July came around, she took a train to Valencia with a return ticket for the end of September and spent almost three months there. During that time, she’d looked on as he quit his rehab therapy. He’d promised (she’d made him promise) that, in exchange, he’d follow the doctor’s advice: walk for an hour every day. But he never did a full hour, just went out for cigarettes, took a short stroll, and then sat on the terrace of some café. Yet he still insisted that he’d walked for an hour; as far as he was concerned, he’d in fact spent too much time moving around. He invented stories about his recovery, not to lie to her, but because he’d started to believe it would happen as if by magic or as a natural reaction by his body, despite the fact that he’d learned in the nursing home that he could only regain full mobility through intensive exercise sessions. But walking again hadn’t been her father’s priority; he wanted to leave Purgatory and get on with his life.

Adriana began to worry about things she’d turned a blind eye to before.

For example: since he’d always refused to throw out food, he kept the leftovers of the meals Teresa prepared, and she found him eating Russian salads that had been in the fridge for five days, picking out the discolored mushrooms from the bottled tomato sauce and pouring it over macaroni, or using moldy cheese in the panini maker, arguing that it tasted better, more like Roquefort. But there were limits to everything. Or rather: she, not her father, had her limits. In the middle of a heat wave, she discovered a greenish Spanish omelet at the back of the refrigerator.

“Cut off the moldy part, and I’ll eat it,” he said.

After warning him that he’d end up with a serious case of the trots and a drip in his arm, Adriana threw the omelet in the trash before her disillusioned father’s eyes and he stormed out of the kitchen.

“If you’re going to be like that, I’d rather you didn’t come,” he said a few hours later, the sweat glistening on his bald scalp and an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

She felt miserable again and thought she should leave him in peace.

If she was going to be less strict with him, she also had to be less strict with herself—become her father, at least in some respects. She went on stealing cigarettes and hiding them in the spare bedroom. Like a child, she began to enjoy smoking in secret, drawing urgently on the cigarette as if she was hooked for life.

Since her mother’s death, and well before her father’s stroke, they had stopped doing what had once been essential chores around the apartment. Switching off and emptying the fridge to get rid of the slight but penetrating smell of the food stored there had always been done in August. Now, that annual task was almost a novelty and the refrigerator had the yellowish tint of plaque on teeth. There were many other chores—once routine but now anomalies—that proved to be sources of illumination: for instance, tidying the under-sink cabinet in the bathroom, which hadn’t been opened for years. From it emerged a toothbrush belonging to her mother, bobby pins, cotton balls, a hair dryer, rollers, razor blades, and a comb. Reorganizing that cabinet, which in the past had been opened on a daily basis and regularly cleaned, was like returning to a country she hadn’t visited for a long time: she had to familiarize herself with its language and customs all over again. Every so often she succeeded in doing something she’d stopped doing, something that had become as strange as it was necessary, as if the old order of things, former rhythms and practices, were battling to retain a small space in the present. Cleaning the dirt from the china plates in the sideboard. Washing drapes. Using the pestle and mortar or the juicer. Putting the old jars of spices and medicines past their expiration dates in the trash. Her father refused to throw out medicine. “That date thing is just a scam!” he’d pronounce, and he really did seem to have a guardian angel in his stomach.

During one of her vacations, before the embolism, Adriana had cleaned all the containers used for olive oil and checked the filters for the tiny remnants that had accumulated there; that detritus wasn’t the dregs of the oil, but miniscule shreds of meat, bits of egg, harmless strands of potato and onion, or merely dust. In reality, there was no way of being sure what lay in those tiny holes; it was just a matter of forming hypotheses and feeling disgusted by whatever it was. She was sure the filters hadn’t been rinsed since her mother’s death. Teresa came every week, but at first it was her father who did the cooking and washed the dirty plates; her task was to do the general cleaning. Adriana remembered having thought that if she made a Spanish omelet using that oil, she might end up ingesting preserved cells from her mother’s skin.

Who decided what counted as negligence? That question had hung in the air since she began to feel responsible for her father; a responsibility nobody had imposed on her, least of all him, who had enjoyed good health in the early years of widowhood. She tried not to meddle—there was no good reason to do so, other than her own sense of loyalty to things being just as they were when her mother was alive and the apartment was run on her rhythms. But the instant Adriana crossed the threshold, she’d turn up her nose at the dust on the books and the increasingly faded colors of the Santa Clara porcelain coffee set—inherited from her grandmother—that was sleeping the sleep of the just in a glass cabinet. Things got worse after his stroke: the caring role she’d struggled against was forced on her. It was even seen as a good thing by others. “Your father needs to get exercise,” her aunts said. “Sign him up for a smoking cessation program”; “Take him back to Madrid with you”; “Watch out for opportunists trying to get their hands on his money”; “Make sure he doesn’t become involved with the caregiver: those women end up owning the apartment.” Even the selection of Vilma had involved a long, hard path littered with well-intentioned intrusions. Suddenly, Adriana had to carry the burden of not only her self-imposed responsibilities as a daughter, but also the demands of the people around her. Their fears. If she’d listened to her family, friends, and acquaintances, she could have come up with a danger ranking, at the top of which would be thieves and prostitutes, followed by the beautiful but cold women from Eastern Europe, widows with debts or dependent children, and curvaceous Caribbean ladies. “Don’t go paying their Social Security, you’ll be better off with an undocumented Romanian, like the one I have; they have to leave the country if they lose their job. I’ll send one over to you tomorrow,” said a distant cousin. The next day, a beautiful, dark-haired Romanian who looked like she’d stepped out of a painting by Julio Romero de Torres called at the door. She didn’t speak a word of Spanish. How were she and Adriana’s father supposed to communicate?

Adriana had wanted everything to be done legally, not just because it was the right thing, but also because she considered it a sign of how serious she was about him receiving the best care, even though she knew there was no connection. Working legally didn’t make anyone any better. While all this was happening, her father had begun to shrug off everything: the fears, the warnings, even the medication, and any trace of stinginess, because he’d never been a miser. He preferred the caregiver not to be working illegally simply because it wasn’t fair, even if it did eat into his meager savings, which consisted of the money he’d gotten back from Social Security after a great many hearings to have his working years recognized.

As there was no way the two characters taking possession of her (her father and her mother) were ever going to reach an agreement—she was in the habit of arguing with herself in the same way her parents had with each other—she could always take the path of least resistance. But stealing cigarettes from him wasn’t going to be enough. She had to learn to relax, not to care two shits about his health, which didn’t mean not valuing his life, quite the opposite: she had to learn to give death the finger by not even considering its possibility; to celebrate life as if death and its emissary, the body, didn’t exist, just as he was doing. Nevertheless, she felt uncertain about giving in unconditionally. She was afraid. Of what? It was most likely an illusion that she could choose between the two family members invading her; she should resign herself to a nonaggression pact.

Adriana had tried unsuccessfully to write about her mother, still blocked by the difficulties they had always had in communicating. Even after her death, her mother made her demands manifest: Do you think you can get close to me in just any old way? There was no way of approaching her naturally without feeling she was getting burned. It was the opposite of her relationship with her father: any means was worth the effort, every road led to him. She sometimes thought that if she decided to get to the very essence of her parents, she’d have to do so in two different texts; their worlds were that far apart. Her father’s was cheerful, lighthearted, focused outward, always in the present, while her maternal universe involved a regression that was not only temporal, but also psychic: a voyage to the unconscious.

Just how had that marriage avoided shipwreck? It was a question she’d begun to ask as an adolescent and for years her understanding had been clouded by the things her youthful self had yet to learn: a couple functions less by their similarities than by the extent to which their differences compensate and complement each other.

They had both had other relationships before they met: her mother’s few and long, her father’s many and short-lived. She was twenty-six, he twenty-nine. She had gone to Gerona for a conference and decided to add a few days at the beach to the trip. He was the manager of the hotel where she was staying. Before that, he’d been a waiter, a desk clerk, head desk clerk, human resource manager, and assistant manager, spending a year in each position. That series of promotions—based on his personal merits rather than being the son of some hotelier—plus his previous affairs with German and Swedish women gave him the confidence to approach the guest with jade-green eyes who was having breakfast alone. She’d attracted his attention as he advanced toward the table where he was also going to eat; he couldn’t help but be fascinated by that petite woman with her fine, elegant manners. He said good morning to the waiter and the maître d’ then sat at the table next to hers and smiled. The bootstrapper and the princess. He received a scowl in return for his trouble and didn’t persist; that evening, when he came across her in the café, he made a display of his power, giving orders to everybody, and this time she was the one to smile, if only slightly, as though in apology for her rudeness that morning. The result was an invitation to a martini and the indifference of that woman with the Extremaduran accent to his direct, likeable, bewildered, very innocent advances. Her father had often told her how difficult it had been to get near her mother, and Adriana had later fleshed out the scene: the vermouth, for example—the only alcohol her mother drank—and a toasted sandwich, because she’d never seen her eat anything else in hotels in the evenings. She wouldn’t have eaten the whole sandwich: she never finished anything. Even when it was simply a piece of candy, she’d leave a small corner of chocolate in the wrapper, as if there was no delicacy undeserving of a little disdain, and, anyway, she’d been raised to peck at her food like a bird: the everlasting fear of putting on weight. She was on vacation and accepted an invitation to spend a week in the hotel, free of charge. From there, Adriana has trouble connecting the dots of a courtship that took place by correspondence. Her mother was working as a pediatrician in a walk-in clinic in Benalmádena, on the Costa del Sol, over 600 miles from Gerona. They were married after six months of objections on her part and a lover’s eagerness on his. Why the hurry between two people who knew practically nothing about each other, and neither of whom were novices? Or maybe they were. “We both wanted to settle down,” her father had once said. That seemed a bland, scarcely credible explanation. But, truth be told, she couldn’t find a better one. There was no pregnancy to be considered, and neither of them was ugly, disagreeable, or lacking other chances. They enjoyed their lives. Her mother postponed the wedding several times; she didn’t want to live in Gerona, and when she finally got there, a married woman, she didn’t even hold out for a year. She couldn’t bear her husband’s job, with its unsociable hours, surrounded night and day by attractive female tourists. She was a public sector employee and so asked to be transferred; she told him that she was not only going to leave, but would also continue asking for transfers until she could find a home nearer to her family in Badajoz. He could follow her or stay in Gerona. He followed. He gave up his steady job and they became nomads for a few years, finally ending up in Valencia rather than Badajoz. Not on the maternal native soil, as had been her intention, but on his, to which he’d never meant to return.

They spent the rest of their lives together in a scarcely recognizable alchemy that, very often, took the form of reproaches and even outright war. That constant wrangling obliged them to negotiate, not to fixate about their personal points of view. Her father brought calm, strength, and patience to the areas of their relationship where her mother was all nerves, fragility, and demanding that things happen immediately. She was the one in charge as she possessed charisma and determination; she was also authoritarian and egocentric, and often overcome by an inexplicable fear that everything might go up in smoke at any moment. When that happened, her father was a retaining wall. Docile, indulgent, with an authority that had no need to impose itself. He had more than his fair share of confidence and no fear of calamities, as he’d been facing them since childhood. He was always seeing opportunities, which meant he tended to have his head in the clouds; her mother would bring him back down to Earth. He’d get tangled up in endless ifs and whens, all meticulously reasoned, while she made decisions at the stroke of a pen on the basis of intuition. He was consistently good-humored, phlegmatic; her moods were in a permanent state of flux: one minute she’d be furious and the next she’d be making some barbed comment and falling down laughing. Peace of mind and composure were unknown quantities for Adriana’s mother, whereas they came naturally to her father.

Adriana, who had inherited the whole bundle of virtues and defects, could never find a sense of equilibrium within herself. She embodied all the roles with an irrational loyalty she had no control over, and when she told herself that she could sign a nonaggression pact with her inheritances, it was simply a lie.

In the years before his stroke, just how many times had her father told a woman he loved her after dating for two or three weeks? He said it to her cat the moment he set eyes on it, when she took it out of the carrier on one of her visits. “I love you, cat.” The word that most surprised her, when he first used it, shortly after becoming a widower, was “sweetheart.” He’d never called his wife that; their romantic language had matured with time, and he never employed any of their usual terms of endearment with anyone else. The women he began to date were “sweethearts” from the start and he even used it to refer to Adriana on the phone. “How are you doing, sweetheart?” “Hugs and kisses, sweetheart!” She felt like one of his online partners and wondered how many hours he spent on his cell phone for it to become a habit to call even his daughter “sweetheart.”

During those years, her father had interminable conversations with women. Whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, and sometimes even nights were spent offloading the story of his life into the ears of these women, some of whom appeared on Meetic profiles with their heads cropped so they wouldn’t be recognized. In addition to “sweetheart,” there was the “This time I think I’ve found the one for me.” “What’s-her-name is a darling, I think she’s the one for me,” he’d told Adriana on ten, twenty, thirty occasions, with the phone or computer at hand, ready to start a new conversation with the next headless woman. “Just in case,” he always replied when she objected to the contradiction involved in saying he’d found the one for him and then immediately linking up with someone else.

What does “I love you” mean? What did he mean by it? Soon those words, uttered as casually as you might say, “Take care of yourself” or pinch the chubby cheeks of the neighbor’s baby, began to litter more intimate conversations. None of those online attachments had lasted: when he didn’t break things off with them, the women broke off with him. “Have you split up with Menganita?” Adriana would ask. “Oh, don’t mention her! What a pain she was!” he’d answer, or “What a busybody!” or “That one? I’m better off without her” or “We have almost nothing in common” or even “She’s a simple-minded woman with little experience of life.” And then there were the “We have nothing to talk about” and the “I found her really boring.” But not long before, in a kind of shallow expression of devotion, he’d told those women he loved them. It wasn’t that he was intentionally lying; those I-love-yous expressed a hope, the possibility of loving that person in the future. The majority of them had played along, taking things just as lightly, as if by a certain age they’d become immune, or were harking back to old-fashioned ways of hooking up, when words of love functioned as common euphemisms for sexual encounters.

He’d started dating the middle-aged women he met on Meetic as a slightly befuddled way of ensuring old age wouldn’t find him alone, particularly when he was experiencing a sudden, happy, second youth. He had nineteen partners in four years; his “partners” were anyone he’d been with for more than a month. That was part of his happiness. The story wasn’t that he was desperately seeking someone to be with and had tried nineteen times, but that he’d dated all those “girls.” He called them girls, a word that was totally juvenile, just like his own soul.

He waited a whole summer before cutting loose, the exact amount of time that Adriana spent with him in Valencia after her mother’s death. Her funeral had been held on July 9, under a scorching sun, and seeing him so vulnerable for the first time, she’d decided to stay until the end of September. Three depressing months of cloying Mediterranean humidity that they spent looking at photos and arranging for family members and her mother’s friends to come choose items of clothing. Well, in fact, she was the one dividing up belongings while her father was driving around the city on a Vespa at sunset, whenever there was a bit of a breeze. The only area he took charge of was organizing the paperwork during interminable mornings of bureaucracy. They each made a will to avoid problems if the other died. At night they went to some small beachfront chiringuito, although Adriana was irritated by the number of people the cruise ships had been disgorging in recent years into a city that, during her childhood and adolescence, hadn’t been on the tourism map. Back then, Malvarrosa had had a scruffy, dilapidated air she’d loved. But it had been a long time since the former spa hotel of Las Arenas, with all its simple elegance, was converted into a flashy beachside complex and the whole esplanade had become a succession of packed terrace bars serving mediocre food for guiris, as the foreign tourists were known, with sangria and loud, cheesy music.

The only thing her father did that summer was sign up on Meetic at the advice of a friend. He’d log on at night to chat for a while, but nothing more. No dates. He was still feeling too dazed by his widowhood and was seeking consolation in friends and his two older sisters, Asela and Piluca. They were retired, living in Santa Pola, near Alicante, and invited him to visit on weekends. Took him to lunch or dinner, or spent the day with him on the beach. Her father hated getting sand in his clothes and would stay in the chiringuito, watching the others take dips in the sea, roast in the sun, and apply high-protection sunscreen that left their skin as white as corpses. Adriana declined most of her aunts’ invitations. She’d figured one thing out: however much they wanted to, they were incapable of consoling one other, first because they each needed to grieve alone and then, more importantly, because the journey through mourning necessitated a common horizon, was a shared project, and that was impossible; she had her boring life as a PhD student with a scholarship at a Madrid university, and her father was throwing himself into, as they say, remaking his life, which implied meeting someone in a similar situation with the desire to have companionship on the final stretch, as he definitely didn’t want to face that stage alone. The only way he could find meaning in things, in himself, was through sharing his days with a woman. He used to talk to her at great length about it, perhaps believing that doing so would ensure a positive outcome. His task now, he insisted, was to meet a sensible person, capable of commitment. The repetition left room for skepticism since what is taken as a given doesn’t need to be alluded to so frequently. And, in fact, her father didn’t take anything for granted; there was an underlying sense of doubt. She didn’t know if his misgivings stemmed from fear of not complying with his own plans, from not trusting them or himself, or from the fact that he simply hadn’t yet come to terms with the death of his wife.

The fun and games started in October. She was back in Madrid and her father began emailing her photos of the women he was flirting with or dating. “What do you think to this one?” he’d ask. Then they both bought smartphones and downloaded WhatsApp so it was her cell phone rather than her Gmail inbox that was filled with images of women in their late fifties and early sixties. It was important to him that she give the thumbs-up to the person’s physique, not so much in terms of a slender figure, beautiful eyes, or gym-sculpted muscles, but something more subtle in the whole look, as if an infallible capacity for commitment—his obsession—could be inferred from an impeccable appearance.

The first woman he dated was Quela, a widow from Massanassa who owned orange orchards and gave Adriana a bracelet; in her free time, the woman made jewelry from pieces of wood, shells, and zircon. She never saw her again because her father broke off the relationship after a few weeks, arguing that she had a jealous streak. Then came the slightly younger Araceli, who lived in Sagunto and was the spitting image of Jacqueline Kennedy. Her father broke off that too, this time because it was impossible to go out to restaurants with her—she hated all the dishes and hardly spoke a word. She was followed by Mari Carmen, Amparo, Roser, and Delfina, all from Valencia, all blonde and standoffish, and none of whom lasted more than a month. They left him before he tired of them. For his next date, he went farther afield, to the home of a certain Nines in Castellón, where he planned to spend five days. Nines was a head taller than her father and twice his weight. In her photo, she looked on the large side, had dyed red hair, and was wearing purple lipstick and eyeshadow. Nines, who was also widowed, introduced him to her children, made plans for his vacations, loaned him an SUV, and firmly believed that she’d found the man she wanted to end her days with. Somewhat overwhelmed, he soon set her straight on that point. And then she stalked him. When her father blocked her calls and emails, Nines found Adriana’s Facebook page and left messages for her: “Your father is the man for me”; “No woman could ever love him more than I do.”

Adriana was surprised that people in their sixties still had romantic illusions, that women with children and marriages behind them could believe it possible to be in love with someone after knowing them for five days. Or was it a kind of regression? Maybe desperation led them to unlearn, to deny everything experience had taught them. Was it possible not to learn anything? Maybe there was absolutely nothing to learn. That idea was spine-chilling. Or maybe it was just Nines; all the others had a more realistic sense of what love was. Usually, there was practicality on both sides: they were looking for company, friendship, but there was no form of passion or sentimentality involved, just a mutual checking out. Moreover, he tended to avoid what he called the “unbalanced” ones: women who were over-the-top in some way, excessively bad-humored, excessively sporty, excessively sensitive. He had no regrets about dropping Nines, nor Lourdes, her successor, who said she was separated from her husband but still lived in the same house as him, and who then moved into her father’s apartment without ever being invited. One night, she cooked croquettes for him and her father got a bad stomachache. Adriana’s aunt Piluca called her immediately:

“The woman is trying to poison him!”

That episode made him more cautious. He continued meeting all the Nurias, Cristinas, Ángeles, Lauras, and Consuelos who were happy to have a beer with him, but if it went beyond that, he’d wait weeks before inviting them home. If he particularly liked the woman, he’d suggest a weekend in some nearby hotel.

Although he still kept her regularly updated on his connections, Adriana lost track. During her visits, she’d sit behind him at the computer to look at all those “beheadeds,” as she called them, although, in fact, as he explained, they were in the minority: he knew from experience that only the ones who were married or shy hid their faces, and he’d stopped dating them, which didn’t stop her from continuing to call them all “beheadeds” just to bug him.

She wasn’t concerned about his juvenile lifestyle. He’d spent the last years diligently caring for his beloved, ailing wife, and before that, over thirty years taking orders from that same sergeant-major of a wife, with equal parts diligence and unconditional love. It had never occurred to him that he’d survive her. A constant source of irritation for Adriana, though, was the amount of money he was spending. In just a few months, he’d gone through his modest savings; sometimes he didn’t have enough to see him through the month and would have to ask one of his sisters for a loan. “What if something happens to you? You’ve got nothing to fall back on,” Adriana began to say. “What if the air conditioning breaks down, or the television, or your car, or all of them give up the ghost at the same time?” she’d protest at each visit. “When I win my case against Social Security and they pay my full pension, I’ll be more comfortable,” he’d reply. “And I’ve cut down on a lot of expenses, but I need to find a partner.” “And can’t these women pay their share? They have their own money. Fuck it, this is the twentieth century. Why do you have to come off all manly?” Her father would shrug his shoulders, which for him was equivalent to an absolute refusal, even if he did know he was in the wrong. He was about to turn seventy and came from a generation where men had to pay to seduce, particularly on the first date. And that was the problem: he rarely got past the first date. When she reminded him of that, he’d be despondent because not only was he leaking money like water, but it was also confirmation of his advancing years.

The apartment had gradually become a labyrinth. It was large, very old-fashioned, and cluttered with things inherited from her mother’s side of the family: tapestries, rugs, revolving bookcases, ceramicware from all around the peninsula, several boxes of antique silver cutlery, porcelain dinner services, huge crystal chandeliers, paintings, prints, African carvings, Lladró figurines, wall clocks, chairs, armchairs, occasional tables, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in three rooms containing the complete library of the only ancestor with intellectual pretensions, who died celibate, having accumulated enough culture for several generations. The whole place was an expression of horror vacui; it needed constant attention, which had formerly been provided by Teresa, who came to clean. Now, whenever Adriana happened to be there on one of her days, Teresa would take her aside to say, “Can’t you persuade your father to throw out some of the papers in his study? It’s impossible to tidy in there!” Or, “Can’t you persuade him to clear out the attic, take the rugs to be cleaned, dust the chandeliers, to at least throw something out?” Her father was having none of it. Adriana knew Teresa was wondering why she didn’t do it, why his daughter didn’t use her visits to bring a little order to the chaos. But she’d already thrown out enough stuff when her mother died, had spent whole months clearing the junk rooms, donating books to libraries, listing white elephants on Wallapop, until she’d had more than enough, and her aunts advised her that she shouldn’t go around cheerfully offloading things that, according to them, were very valuable. “Why don’t you have them auctioned?” they said. “You’ll need the money,” a distant cousin warned one day. There was a hint of vengeance in her words. They could no longer count on her mother’s generous salary as a pediatrician. What’s more, although Adriana doubted the value of all those possessions, something was holding her back. She was done with breaking her back. She resolved to do as little as possible, but then the embolism came along, multiplying the number of things she had to take charge of, leaving even less time for all the paintings, tapestries, fabrics, dinner services, silverware, books, and counterpanes belonging to great-grandmothers and their mothers, and the mountain of papers, and the cluttered junk rooms. Her father’s health became her main, and at times only, concern. Lady Death and Lady Manipulator—two deities of the darkness that had begun to surround her during her mother’s illness—took all her energy, and then she felt like those devices that control people’s activities, giving a warning whenever they stray from a healthy lifestyle: “You haven’t worked out for two weeks”; “Your blood pressure is higher”; “Your pulse is faster today”; “Have you taken your medication?”; “Have you stopped smoking?” Yet, not even after his stroke did her father think about death, or the possibility that he might not fully recover. But he did, on the other hand, think about how hard it was going to be to find a partner now that he had one useless hand, a walker, and a pace not much faster than a snail’s.

She’d moved from Madrid to a smallish apartment in Colmenar Viejo, some eighteen miles away, after getting a teaching position at a private university. Her thesis had been handed in over a year before and her father was still in good health. It was only three stops on the commuter train from the campus on the outskirts of the capital to her new apartment, but the landscape changed drastically as soon as she started her homeward journey: industrial parks and woodland. The image of a dense, dark mass of stately trees that sprung to mind when you pronounced the word “forest” didn’t apply here; these woodlands consisted of Mediterranean vegetation altered by human intervention centuries before. Pine trees and holm oak planted the correct distance apart, with scattered residential areas, detached houses with gardens, warehouses, and two universities. The distant mountains were almost always a dark blue. At night they had no color and blended into the black sky, leaving only the lights of villages on the foothills. That undefined agglomeration of twinkling settlements, countryside, industrial parks, and houses never seemed to change, but at the same time was constantly new due to being unchartered territory. In winter, the sensation of traveling by train before dawn, in a foreign country, through remote landscapes was accentuated. If she spoke, the reply would come in some unknown language; silence, however, would predominate.

Having a slightly larger apartment with her own office space was another reason for leaving Madrid, where she’d only just been able to afford a cubbyhole near the stinking landfill site in Valdemingómez. Colmenar Viejo was to the north, on the road to the sierra; her apartment was attractive and had a view of the highway to the capital and the train station. It was a long time—too long—before she was able to settle in and enjoy it because two days after she moved, her aunt called at eleven at night to tell her that her father had suffered a stroke. She remembers having looked at the bare walls of the living room, for which she wanted to find bookshelves, and sensing her father’s desolation. She bought a train ticket for first thing the following morning. What followed were exhausting months of traveling to and from Valencia, and then to and from the university, where she spent most of her day; for weeks she had the sensation of having no home as she never spent long enough in her apartment to alter its provisional air. She’d arrive back there so tired that emptying the boxes seemed a laborious task; while they were still there, she used them as a low table for the dining area and a nightstand by her bed, and the ones she’d unpacked but not yet thrown out were a luxury for her cat, who had had enough of the coming and going and would race from room to room every time she took out its carrier. Six months passed before she bought a bed frame and stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and another six before she held a party for friends, who went with her to IKEA to buy furniture and helped her assemble it in exchange for a fun weekend in Colmenar. That meant drinking too much at dinner and a morning trip to the Santillano reservoir, with the lunar landscape of La Periza glowing in the distance. She was relieved to finally be returning to the routine visits she’d paid her father before his illness. And it was only then that she found time to reread everything she’d written.

First, he sent some photos in which he looked young. Very young. In one of them, he was standing on a roof, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. His arms were akimbo and he was looking down distractedly. The jeans outlined muscular legs. And the same athletic physique was apparent from the waist up. Under his feet were the boards of the typical houses you see in American movies. If that man had moved along a roof so naturally at such a young age, he must be quite something now that he’s older. But what was the sense in sending photos of a twenty-year-old self? It didn’t reflect well on him. She should say so. Next, he sent a more recent shot. This time he was wearing khaki combat pants and a white T-shirt. His left arm was stretched along the back of a couch, as if it had been around someone (but he said he’d been single for years, without even the odd fling). So who had taken the photo? It could only be a woman who had just left his side. If it had been a man, his arm wouldn’t have been on the back of the couch. Or maybe that was taking it too far. It could have been a male friend or brother holding the phone. In that case, his outstretched arm would be part of a pose for the photo. The hypothetical male friend had stood up and he’d settled back. In fact, his gaze gave no clue as to whether it was a man or woman behind the camera. He was smiling, but his expression showed nothing more than a moment’s relaxation, which brought to mind a snapshot, the sort where two people are caught up in an animated conversation.

Their meetings were interminable because they used Google Translate. For a couple of weeks they just messaged, but one day he suggested a Skype call, even though all they could do was stammer “Hola!” and “Hello!” His appearance on Skype wasn’t so different from the photo. The look in his eyes was the same, as was his mustache, fine as a metallic thread. It seemed he wouldn’t be satisfied if the call lasted less than half an hour, as if good communication began only after a certain number of minutes.

In spite of the fact that she enjoyed looking at such a handsome Texan who was so determined to keep up daily communication in a language he didn’t speak, it would have been more sensible to have nothing to do with him. The situation was getting increasingly absurd and she didn’t even feel curious about his intentions. Then he confessed his plan of going to Mali to buy cheap gold. It took three minutes of messaging to tell her that. He could sell it at twice the price. And he was willing to share the proceeds, he wrote, after consulting Google Translate. When that message appeared on the screen, he winked at her. Then his expression became strangely intense; his eyes were fixed on the camera, trying to express something that was possibly profound. He was sanctified by the seriousness of his propositions and it was the most important thing he’d told her.

He left on his trip a week later, and she had no news for another two weeks. When she thought she’d heard the last of him, she received an email; it was the first time he’d used that mode of communication. He told her that he’d been detained at the border, carrying a suitcase full of gold. He needed a loan.

All was clear now: it was time to block him from her Skype and Meetic accounts and mark him as spam on Gmail, along with those scams where some African fat cat on the point of death asks you to be his heir. But the Texan had really put his back into the swindle; you had to give him that, and, anyway, she was curious to see just how far he would go. Best to play along. Her reply was noncommittal.

He continued sending desperate emails with exhaustive descriptions of his plight. Stinking latrines, friskings, delays, defiant looks, wails coming from the border post in the early hours. The dense fog at first light frightened him and he didn’t leave the rental car, where he slept until that gray mass dispersed. He was paranoid, thinking that the people in the border post were spreading that damned fog over the cars of the people waiting there. The fog inspired mortal fear in all of them; many of the men still believed the old African legend that the dawn mist was composed of evil spirits whose mere touch would cause a human to be struck down by a terrible disease and die. When the fog cleared and he was finally able to leave the car, he found that the other men had done the same as him: taken refuge in their vehicles or in the restrooms, on the alert for any procession of wraiths. He could see panic on their faces, although by mid-morning they’d be huddled together, looking at him; he sometimes had the impression that they were making fun of him. Although there were no other whites around, people seemed unfazed by his presence, as if he was a substitute for another who’d been stuck at the border for months. They must all know he had something valuable in the trunk of his car, but not even the customs officers had tried to seize it, which is what he’d expected if they wouldn’t accept a bribe.

He was tempted to open the suitcase and leave it lying there under the blazing sun. He cursed himself for having chosen that scheme. He’d been naïve, hadn’t thought things through; he’d imagined any problems would be related to local mafias and that officials would turn a blind eye for a share of the gold. He was being detained without knowing why. Some men disappeared during the night. Had they escaped or been killed? He’d trafficked drugs and animals in the past, but never like this, never alone. One of the officers allowed him to write some emails and he’d thought of his former buddy and partner; Elmore knew about trafficking arms in Africa and it was possible he could help, although he might still be holding a grudge: almost a year ago his ex-partner had beat him up badly enough to need hospitalization for fucking his woman.

The only person he had any communication with was Oumar, a black man who sat with him in the only bar on the border: a shack that served maflé rice and chicken in peanut sauce. Oumar would sit silently at his side, without looking at him, his hands on his lap, frowning, while he himself was eating his rice. He had no idea how old he was, but Oumar was less personable than the other men, with his spindly legs and triangular belly, like an enormous thumbtack. He spent a lot of time alone, sitting on a bench in the awful heat, looking fed up. Sweat poured down his face and his eyes were invariably focused on the window, as though there was something outside that required his constant vigilance. Together, they would monitor the flow of traffic. Many people arrived in trucks and some, the ones who weren’t allowed to continue on, would have disappeared without trace by dawn. But the majority stayed there. During the mornings a hundred or so vehicles would be waved through; they were always full of families with children and grandparents. He hadn’t seen any women driving; they were always in the passenger seat with large baskets on their knees.

“This isn’t the best place for us,” Oumar would say every so often.

He was dirty, smelled bad; none of the men could take a shower or wash their clothes. Neither could he, although he did scrub the cuffs and collar of his shirt and the bottom hem of his pants each day after spraying them with dry-wash, and he cleaned up as best he could in the restrooms of the border post. He thought women wouldn’t find Oumar particularly attractive. That was a strange idea to come into his head there, where women just passed through and everything disappeared, except for the absurd border post and the mystery of why he was being detained.

One day he decided to get out of his car while it was still foggy and discovered that it was dust, not water vapor. It didn’t settle on his car or on any other surface, just hung, suspended in the air like living particles. He understood why the men thought the particles were evil spirits. He stood there, unmoving, next to the rental car in which he’d slept for so many nights that it was beginning to feel like home. He put a hand on the hood, with the strange feeling that if he removed it, the dust would pull him from where he stood and carry him far away.

Even though his eyes hurt, he didn’t close them. Then he saw a body floating in the fog, like a soul being kidnapped by some god. That was the mystery of the disappearances.

The man he was watching stopped ascending. He was frightened; he couldn’t breathe, as though the suspended dust seemed to have occupied everything, including his lungs. He kept his eyes on the floating body as it began to descend through the clearing fog and, on reaching the ground, walked off in a way that looked familiar. It dawned on him that it was Oumar, calmly moving away from him, in full possession of himself.

Adriana had started writing these stories as a kind of Scheherazade battling against Lady Death shortly after her mother passed on: to be exact, on the very day when she bent down to pick up a chickpea and saw the cupboard under the sink sway and felt that an immense, drunken wave motion was issuing from the floor tiles. She felt giddy and lost her balance. The word “vertigo” popped into her mind. If the dizziness hadn’t continued to snake around her for a while longer, she’d have thought it was an earthquake. She had another bout of giddiness in the library, when she was coming back from the restrooms, watched by an elderly lady who looked at her as if she’d finished off a couple of bottles of whiskey while she was in there, and a third just after leaving the supermarket: she ended up sitting on the stairs of an underground passage that smelled of shit. The fourth lasted a few hours and she had to take to her bed. She visited a doctor, did some tests that ruled out anything serious: if her grandmother and aunts suffered from vertigo, the doctor told her, it probably ran in the family. She had to accept that she’d suffer these attacks from time to time. Had she been under stress?

She was in the late stages of a doctoral thesis that she was finding incredibly boring. Feeling like she’d hit a brick wall, writing came on the scene as both a necessity and an escape. She invented extensions to anecdotes she’d been told; continuations that always consisted of exaggerating, of moving in any direction that would get her out of the stasis of her life, of its exasperating emptiness. What she really wanted was to write about her mother, but she couldn’t; every time she was at the point of starting, the impetus was swiftly replaced by one of those anecdotes, easier to deal with and more fun than her maternal universe, and she’d slide down it like someone on a toboggan.

She alternated her work on the thesis with a monotonous social life and classes she taught as if in her sleep. The attacks of vertigo only ever occurred when she was alone: they were ashamed to show their faces in public. The more she tried to hurry along her thesis, the more disgusted she’d feel, and then would come the dizziness. But her scholarship ran out and she had no option but to finish off that boring chore, that career path she’d embarked on when university life seemed a worthy direction and she still believed in theory. Theory, as the best tool for knowing and changing the world and herself, had gone on and on in repellent succession for years. It was some time before she could admit that it wasn’t a “higher” path. These days, she was surprised by how firmly she’d clung to her own hubris. During the early years at her university department, she’d thought of herself and her coterie as revolutionaries, although she could only have explained what the revolution they were close to bringing about consisted of by use of vague terminology, in an academic argot that had initially revealed things but then became dry, stiff, dead, fossilized, as if it was in the nature of language to be always in motion because life is like that too. She didn’t realize that, rather than being revolutionaries, they were revolutionized by the amazement of discovering so many readings, so many new visions that, once returned to the library shelf from which they had been extracted, would remain there like overripe, shriveled intuitions.

The hardest part was that she had to finish the thesis under the pretense that she still believed it was the optimum path and, moreover, do it in a year when spring had begun at the end of February. From her claustrophobic apartment, she’d observe the resplendent sunlight outside; all she had to do was to kick the laptop, say to hell with everything she’d once considered important and now seemed nothing more than an obligation, but she didn’t feel capable of doing that, didn’t have the courage. Lady Death strutted her stuff: “You’re an onlooker to life,” she said. “It’s not for you, you get dizzy!” Traveling to Valencia to visit her father began to be the most interesting thing she did. With the excuse of spending more time with him, she’d put her thesis aside and they’d go out for lunch, for dinner, or for a walk. They talked about the women he was meeting and he even related the things those women told him about their cyberdating experiences, and that was when, based on that endless collection of romantic afflictions, she started to make notes about the most bizarre ones and add elements from her own harvest. In a few months, those notes had become something much longer, something resembling a novel, and that was thanks not only to her father, but also to Martina.

“How are you, sweetheart?” Martina would ask whenever they saw each other. She was a big woman with long, wavy hair that fell over loose animal-print shirts. Adriana met her one July, right after she’d arrived in Valencia. Her father had suggested a trip to Peñagoloso, in the vain hope of finding cooler air, and proposed bringing a friend along. “A good friend,” he qualified. That use of “good friend” had a meaning as specific as his “I love you”: it simply meant that the woman wasn’t another flirtation or even really a “good” friend, just one of the many “new” friends he’d made since love became his primary occupation. At that first encounter, instead of “Nice to meet you, sweetheart,” Martina had said, “Hi, sweetheart.” Adriana had to reconsider the import of that word. Was it equivalent to “guy” or “chick” for people of a certain age, or was it all that was left to them after unsuccessfully attempting to appeal to one another? Perhaps her father had picked up the habit of using the word from Martina and was now employing it with all the other women. Rather than Peñagoloso, they toured the small mountain towns of Maestrazgo, traveling along roads that wound through limestone gorges and rocks that looked like the dried-out, cracked carapaces of crustaceans; the sun beat down on the crags, flat-topped hills, and terraces, and the whole landscape glowed, almost like it was about to burst into flames. They parked, checked out the main square of each town, and walked there in the shade of a wall; then they fanned themselves as they drank a beer before continuing their journey. Between stops, Martina told her about her divorce, said she had two children and had run a pretty profitable hamburger restaurant until the shopping mall where it was located went bust when another, larger one was opened a mile or so away.

“And what do you do?” Martina asked when they sat down to lunch.

“I studied philosophy and now I’m finishing my PhD thesis,” Adriana replied.

She hoped Martina wasn’t going to ask her what the thesis was on since she always felt ridiculous when she had to explain it.

“I could never get the hang of philosophy,” was the only response she received.

That day, they returned along the coast road, with its umpteen industrial estates and roaring trucks. It was the first of many more meetings, always in the evening at Martina’s place.

Summer was low season for internet flirting, at least in the age group in which her father was searching for a partner. The women were at their beach apartments, traveling abroad, or looking after grandchildren; there was also a scarcity of acquaintances, and all those relatives and friends who, when he was first widowed, had included him in their weekend plans. Given his intense amorous activity, they assumed the period of mourning had reached its conclusion. The hiatus came at just the right moment for him; he was flat broke, had debts, and was always close to overdrawing his checking account: he needed time to get his finances back in shape. The Martina thing was possibly just a casual acquaintanceship resulting from boredom and the fact that neither of them was taking a vacation. She and her father spent every other evening at her house in El Palmar, where, from the roof terrace, you could see the freshwater lagoon of the Albufera. Martina would cook fish and they brought a desert and the white wine they drank in moderation. Neither her father nor Martina were big drinkers and as Adriana would have to spend the following day working on her thesis, she couldn’t afford to wake up with a hangover.

Martina had signed up on a number of dating sites. And she collected stories. She was particularly attentive to the men with outlandish lives, which made Adriana think that the true reason for setting up a profile on those sites was collecting rare treasures rather than looking for a partner. The first evening they went for dinner, after her “Hi, sweetheart!” she sat Adriana in front of her computer screen, where a fifty-something, graying, fair-haired man said, “Hi,” in English and Martina introduced her as “My new friend,” in the same language before logging off.

“He’s from Texas,” Martina informed her. “Good looking, isn’t he? We sometimes just leave the computer on to keep each other company.”

“Do you plan to meet?”

“Hell, no. I don’t even want to. I chat with him because he’s a bit crazy and that amuses me. He’s been in prison for smuggling iguanas. I lie to him. No way do I want him turning up here someday. He thinks I live in Soria. Anyhow, I only know four words of English.”

Martina had a cage that occupied a whole wall, where a squirrel ran up and down the wooden planks. That was the only area not covered by faded, pale pink textured paint or crammed with old, chipboard furniture, as unassuming as the small house itself. She could have sold the house at a good price, but was keeping it for her grown-up children, whose portraits were everywhere. They could make more out of it from tourist rentals.

On their third visit, Adriana brought a bag of peanuts for the squirrel. She held the shells close to the bars of the cage and it made a quick squeak each time it grabbed them, as if there was a chance they might be swiped by the old sausage dog, looking bored but alert: it seemed to be hoping one of the shells might be miraculously transformed into a juicy steak. As she was feeding the squirrel, she could hear the voices of her father and Martina, who was laughing at the same speed as the animal leaped at the peanuts.

Adriana listened to them. She listened to them endlessly. Her whole year had been spent listening to her father, to the few old friends she had left, and to her fellow students at the university. And while she was writing up her thesis, she’d open Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to keep abreast with the affairs of others. “Listening to gossip to find out what’s going on in my own life,” she read in a tweet. She wanted to turn her back but at the same time to find answers. Social media issued them from every conceivable angle: self-help and skeptical, constructive and destructive, intelligent and stupid, scientific and esoteric, warm, hotheaded, orthodox and heterodox, decontextualized, irate, not irate, and angles she couldn’t identify. Eventually that din became as tedious as the inhabitants of her thesis, those voices of authority that had excited her in the past but now left her in despair. Turning her back on it all only functioned if she had the sensation of going from one thing to another and resolving something along the way, and the process worked both ways: when she spent too much time on social media, she’d leave to return to the thesis, which would suddenly become a refuge.

And it seemed the whole world had started dating online. She knew all about the problems of a female friend who was always being scammed and another who was bisexual and thought she had to choose one gender or the other, and a male friend who only went for people who made him suffer, and the PhD students who were as fed up as herself, and the acquaintances she came across at the university or in bars. Some of their ills were romantic, others frivolous, but to her they felt interchangeable: the people themselves, their frivolous or romantic angsts; it seemed that what was at stake was something she couldn’t put a name to, a sort of amorous version of OCD that kept every possibility open at the cost of never concretizing anything, except for what ended in failure. Once a week, she went to the university to teach a class that was part of her scholarship requirement and, during the lunch break, generally came across the department secretary; a divorcee with two children who would give her a highly detailed account of her ongoing problems with men. Adriana wasn’t the only recipient of her endless story. That woman was on a site for demanding singles, attended divorcee events, and told anyone who would listen about her adventures: the teaching staff, the kids working in the cafeteria, the maintenance men, and quite a number of students knew everything about her private life and attempted to avoid her because she was such a bore. She’d give obsessive breakdowns of the man-of-the-moment’s clothes and hairstyle, what he’d studied and where, how much he’d said he earned, the car he drove, the type of restaurant he’d invited her to, and so on until she got to the fucking, which she also described, particularly if it had involved a lost erection, impotency, or some form of perversion. Many people believed the woman was crazy and made it all up. The department secretary was capable of cornering someone for hours to dissect the events of a single night, as if the experience only became real through being related to an audience. She needed to be continually evaluated. “What do you think?” she’d eventually ask of her exhausted interlocutor. “What should I do?” Nobody knew how to answer. She was lost, apparently incapable of acknowledging her desire. Adriana ended up hiding whenever she saw her coming.

In that environment, where everyone was speaking about their sexual encounters, she timidly began to mention her father’s dates. Whenever she said he was on Meetic and seeing women, the same people who regularly used internet dating sites were scandalized. “Surely parents don’t do that!” they exclaimed incredulously. Surely parents didn’t do that? Maybe what they were trying to express was that parents could do it, but only behind their offspring’s backs. Her father’s case was similar to the secretary’s, not in a need to tell someone all, but because he refused to accept the conventions.

He’d always been an exception to the rule, although that had never been his aim. He had no desire to be special; he was the most ordinary of men, who, due to his father’s suicide and the loss of the family’s income, had seen himself headed for a life as a permanent survivor until he met his wife and began to feel he was recovering something of what had been thrown into disarray in his childhood. He’d never tried to hide her grandfather’s suicide from Adriana, among other things, because it had been he who’d found him with his jugular slashed. She’d often recreated that moment, imagining an eleven-year-old boy walking down a long hallway. The child had woken early that day. He needed to pee and knew that at that hour, when the sky still held its nocturnal density and dawn light was scarcely a glow, his father, Juan Ruiz, would be up and ready to set off for the central market, where he was a fishmonger. Juan Ruiz had invested all his capital in a business that turned out to be a scam and been ruined. There was a foreclosure order on the fish store and the house. That day, as the child slipped silently down the hallway, he noticed something strange in the atmosphere, a more profound quietness than was usual, as if something had been permanently silenced. It was late November. No sound came from the bathroom, but through the transom window over the door he could see that the light was on. He didn’t dare knock in case he woke someone or got smacked for his trouble. Time passed, he was feeling cold; he finally went to the kitchen and peed in a pail, but he didn’t return to his bedroom; the enormity of the silence was frightening. He turned the knob of the bathroom door and tried to open it. The bolt had been turned from inside. It was six o’clock; his father should have left before then. The boy went back to the kitchen for the step ladder and climbed up to look through the transom. He saw his father there, on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. It took him at least a minute to digest the scene before he screamed to wake his mother and sisters.

That was the beginning of the toughest period in his life. He’d often told her about the outcome of that blow, so brutal that it still pained him. They were evicted from the house and for a while the four of them were crammed into a caretaker’s room. Then they left for Madrid, where they got by on his sisters’ earnings as servants and by converting their small apartment into a guesthouse. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, her father was a station porter, a bellhop, a newspaper delivery boy, and a tailor’s assistant, while also studying for his vocational baccalaureate. The family was living on a shoestring. Whenever one of the guests left, a sense of anguish would sour the atmosphere until a new one was found. Adriana’s grandmother died young of a heart attack; her father was left with no sense of family ties and ended up on the Costa Brava, working in hotels, where he found his vocation. Good times followed: promotions, money, dating lots of girls. Youth. Then he fell in love and married.

Adriana had treasured that story as if it was a movie. She’d always considered her father to be a man with a conventional life. Yet now that he’d regained his single status, she recognized that boy who had been left with nothing, and also the man who became a hotel manager and then packed in his job to follow a woman from province to province, doing whatever work he could find: pharmaceutical rep, selling fabrics, fertilizers, china, cement. All this before ending up back in Valencia in a travel agency. From that period, her father retained hundreds of stories of people from every walk of life and an astonishing ability for handling them all, which made him a skilled negotiator. For Adriana, that past was more unreal than the usual family history due to the profusion of locations, individuals, and circumstances referred to. She didn’t imagine he still had that talent for opening himself to every situation, but the death of his wife had been enough to return him to that go-getter self, even if his go-getting was now focused on women.

She felt the need to observe him minutely, although initially she didn’t admit to herself that was why she never missed one of Martina’s dinners (the WhatsApp group the three of them shared was called “Hi, sweetheart”). She told herself it was because she was bored, was just to accompany him, that she loved viewing the silvery smoothness of the Albufera, that she missed her mother and Martina was maternal, but she could have spent the time with her own friends in the beachside terrace bars. The truth was that she was fascinated by the change in her perception of her father. Suddenly, those forty years of playing the docile, faithful husband didn’t seem to fit.

How much of that bustling dating activity was a charade, a matter of not wanting others to see his dread of having to face old age alone? He wasn’t a coward, but when he was afraid, he went into denial, apparently believing that any admission of his fears would multiply them. And that string of women was an effective trick: he was kept constantly entertained and one of them might end up being his partner. Or maybe not.

When he suffered the stroke, her questions about her father opened up like a wide prairie. With one useless hand, and only able to walk at a snail’s pace, he began to find it hard to encounter women who wanted to meet him, and when he did, they rarely agreed to a second meeting. He was spending less money on dates, but still wasn’t saving. He started purchasing expensive smartphones, taking out insurance policies, binge buying as if money meant nothing to him, and she thought that was an aspect of her father’s character she had still to learn about, that essential, radical couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude in respect to almost everything. That, however, probably wasn’t true either, was just her own hopeful conclusion.

But it was still a few years before that point in the story was reached. Back then, while Adriana was writing her thesis, she could only be certain that Lady Death was still there, along with an overwhelming ennui when she thought about the “future,” a word that sounded straight out of an insurance policy advertisement. She didn’t find it surprising that she’d become an insatiable observer of others. Her seclusion expanded; she couldn’t find the rhythm for any other kind of movement. To avoid being left out of conversations, she attempted to follow TV and streamed series but found them boring. A university friend got pregnant and had a child; at the age of thirty, she was the first parent in her circle. Adriana went to welcome the baby, taking with her a plush elephant she’d bought at a pharmacy. When she saw the creature in its crib, the mother sitting on the couch, and the father unpacking a box of diapers they’d won in a prize draw in a magazine about child nutrition, she couldn’t avoid feeling suffocated.

Everything had been full of contradictions since her mother’s death. For the first time, she was aware of the extreme fragility of bonds, of life. What had been for years a heavy burden suddenly vanished, became nothing.

Lady Death terrified her. That might be the reason why, while spending the summer in Valencia with Martina and her father, she thought about leaving Madrid, returning home; given the new situation, Valencia was where life was happening.

When Martina asked one evening why she didn’t have a partner, Adriana blushed to the roots of her hair. Not that the question came as a surprise: she’d been looting too many stories without giving anything in return. She even wanted to talk about it. But she blushed and, moreover, felt like a poor spinster, like that ugly, shameful woman, almost an outcast, in her mother’s hometown. Whenever she passed their door, her grandmother would quietly comment, “There goes the spinster.” Why did she feel like that?

Months before, she’d read The Golden Notebook, in which Doris Lessing explores, among other things, the relationships of a “free” woman who still feels incomplete without a man. Adriana was experiencing that same emotional vacuum, except that in her case, she found it hard to accept her own need and not present herself as a happily emancipated heroine. But over half a century had passed since the publication of The Golden Notebook, and weren’t women “freer” now? As that was true, it sounded like a rhetorical question. Lessing’s novel had made her admit to herself what was going on in her head when she judged “unfree” women—and herself—as stupid. And her judgement of men—including her own father—was no less harsh.

During her mother’s illness, Adriana had seen a psychologist. She didn’t feel capable of enduring that slow death without help and believed therapy might prepare her for dealing with the grief. She was caught off guard by the apparently indirect approach (she later realized she’d been grabbed by the lapels) to something she’d never considered a problem. “It’s not just that you don’t communicate, you don’t make any attempt to connect with others,” declared the therapist, her eyes half-closed and a quivering, arthritic finger pointing fiercely at her. “You’re a coward.” It was a moral rather than psychological judgment and she found it fit perfectly. As an exercise, she was told to initiate conversations and keep a record of their content. Adriana bought a brown notebook, which she called “The Book of Talking,” and jotted down what she said to people. The Book of Talking filled up with scraps of dialogue; whenever she read through them, she had a sense of absurdity; here was the proof that she approached others with small lies, omissions, or exaggerations so as not to appear dull. On reading the book, the psychologist responded in the same caustic tone, weighted with reason, as before:

“These are elevator conversations. Where in all this is anything that exposes you? Why do you refuse to talk about yourself?”

Adriana put up resistance. The therapist became one more of her fears. She’d hear her voice at night. What if that woman was only destroying her further? But, despite all, she went along with the construction or destruction because she’d lost any sense of what was in her best interest.

The dark period was behind her, although she still felt a coward when it came to talking about herself. That was why she simply listened to her father and Martina without opening her mouth.

It had been two years since her last relationship. She couldn’t exactly say that she’d broken up a marriage, even though she had told him that she didn’t want to go on seeing him if he didn’t leave his wife. The truth was that they’d never seen much of each other, but Adriana had no desire to be the lover of a married man, so she’d thrown down that gauntlet without expecting it to be taken up.

“Give me three days,” he’d said.

It was a Thursday. On the Sunday, at ten at night, she’d been stupefied when the man turned up at her apartment with two bags. He was a journalist, had three daughters, a beard, and a dog; his wife had had an affair with another, more successful reporter. He was the perfect incarnation of the pained but stoic husband who had been understanding enough to put up with the arrival in his home of presents from another man: lingerie, chocolates, books. But his marriage was on the rocks and he was just looking for a feasible way to separate. Adriana didn’t want to meet his daughters until a reasonable period had passed. If truth be told, she didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s daughters; her own or someone else’s: she’d never desired children. They lived together in a passionate relationship for almost three years until he left, without her having noticed any signs of disillusion, falling out of love, or boredom. The bearded man, as she sometimes called him for his resemblance to a rabbi, walked out as unexpectedly as he’d arrived. She was in love, perhaps more deeply than ever, and was left in a state of shock. A week later, her mother told her that the cancer had metastasized and was now terminal.

The force of those two almost simultaneous blows heralded the period of extreme, unconscious non-communication. She was unaware that weeks could pass without her speaking to anyone. She didn’t answer the phone, didn’t understand the point of friendships that seemed so distant they might have belonged to someone else. She continued researching her thesis on autopilot and spent as much time as possible in Valencia to be with her mother. Death was a protracted process, it could take a long time to complete; she met patients who’d spent years dying. The psychologist, her mother’s death—interrupting that long and painful ending—enabled her to keep afloat, but she’d changed. She’d lost her lightheartedness.

Now, Martina and her father were a master class in lightheartedness. It was one of life’s necessities. Why had she wanted to allow herself to die?

Then came other stories. There was Max; his skull had been shattered in an accident and he couldn’t even bear to look at his face in a mirror. After seven years of rehabilitation to recover the atrophied areas of his memory, his speech, and his ability to use paintbrushes (he earned a living restoring church frescos and altarpieces), he’d reached the point of wanting a partner. His skull was composed of metal plates that he refused to hide under a wig, although he’d Photoshopped his Meetic picture a little. But was there anyone out there who wouldn’t run a mile upon finding themselves dating a southern Spanish version of the Terminator? He ended up with a woman whose three previous elderly husbands had died without the cause of death being established. He suspected her potions. The woman boasted of being able to cure any physical or spiritual affliction with brews whose recipes had been passed on to her by her great-grandmother, a witch from a Galician village. She forced him to drink a large daily dose of some herbal concoction that upset his stomach. Or maybe it was his own wariness that made his gut burn. The witch had inherited money from her previous husbands, plus a number of apartments in town centers, but he wasn’t even a homeowner and had no savings; his income was pitiful and he lived in a rental property. What did she want with him? And why did he need her when she frightened him and, in addition, was plain ugly?

The truth was that she was the only woman who hadn’t taken to her heels on seeing the metal shell that was his skull. He couldn’t hope for anything better, he thought. Then, one day, the witch made him clean her house. It was summer, the thermometer was showing ninety-eight, and then he also had to mow the grass in the garden, where there wasn’t a single tree, and skim the leaves and dead dragonflies from the pool. He was sweating like a pig. You could have fried an egg on the metal plates in his head. It felt like his brains were boiling. He’d earned a dip in the pool, and that’s what he did. The moment he dove in, the witch flounced out of the house. How could he even think of polluting her pool with his disgusting sweat? That’s when he left her. Left the only woman who had agreed to put up with his metal skull.

He tried the beheaded women. There were thousands of them on eDarling and Meetic, showing their bodies from the neck down. Almost all the women of that age were middle-class; he wondered if those from humbler origins used other sites. He’d imagine those beheadeds taking off their tan boots, removing their tan pants, their tan sweaters, because those sixtyish women all dressed the same way and seemed identical. They were tan women with blonde highlights. After meeting five or six, he was incapable of remembering their features and realized that what he liked were the profile photos without the faces, where you saw just a chin and a badly wrinkled neck. He felt that those over-the-hill necks had a kinship with his metal skull and so he began sending messages to all the women who didn’t show their faces.

The vast majority of them were married, so he soon gave up. He wasn’t looking for affairs, and if he needed to fuck, he could visit sex workers, who didn’t shy away from his metal plates. For them, physical defects weren’t a problem; what bothered them were the odious types and poor hygiene. He was always clean. He showered twice a day and gently pulled back his foreskin to remove any fine hairs and other bits and pieces that the day had deposited there or in other recondite spots, portions of time that refused to go away. In rehab, he’d met a man named Ramón whose head was like an Edam cheese with a bite taken out. Although he could hardly speak or move and required almost round-the-clock care, with the help of a piece of paper and a few drawings, Ramón had managed to organize a visit to a cathouse. A nurse was to accompany him to the door of the most famous brothel in the area and Max volunteered to go in with him. The two Ukrainian sex workers who attended them didn’t blink an eyelid at the sight of Ramón’s half-bitten skull or when Max took off his ridiculous Humphrey Bogart hat to display his gleaming scalp. Ramón left in tears, and that had depressed Max as he saw himself reflected in the other. He stopped going to brothels and, after being turned down by a number of women, convinced that he’d never find anyone, he admitted defeat. But that didn’t rid him of the desire for companionship, and only led him to feeling low and tuning into a late-night radio show where people phoned in to talk about their relationship problems. The hosts made fun of their listeners and although he sometimes detested all that cruelty, he felt it was better that their laughter held no trace of humanity, that someone was mocking the constant state of anguish that was love. He told himself that nobody gets used to falling even if they’re doing it all the time, just like they don’t think twice about boarding a plane but experience the same fear on each occasion. You don’t overcome things. There’s no way of knowing what happens to them; sometimes everything changes for no apparent reason.

She managed to finish her thesis by sheer force of will. But that involved denying herself access to social media for the whole summer, deleting her Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. Her escape route had become her prison! She held firm, however, and the only stories that filtered through to her, which she then scribbled down at high speed, were from Martina and her father. She also allowed herself minimally short breaks: going out onto the terrace or opening the fridge in search of a lemonade and a little cool air. While she was working, her father continued pinging women on Meetic. The smoke stains on the ceiling above his computer began to resemble a leak from the apartment above. “Do you like this one?” he’d ask when she walked down the hallway. “What about her?” “They’re all the same, Dad,” she’d reply, and shut herself away with her thesis again. On September 20, at half past eight in the evening, she finally put an end to the torture, and although she still needed to proofread the text, she went out into the street as if she’d already defended the thesis and a brilliantly smooth panorama stretched out before her. She walked for over an hour, feeling like she was flying. Her steps didn’t take her to the sky but to the supermarket in El Corte Inglés, where she bought two bottles of a good-quality cava to celebrate with Martina and her father.

Two months went by before her defense and over a year before she got a job at a private university; in the interim, she’d covered a leave of absence in an exclusive school in Ciudalcampo, on the outskirts of Madrid. During that whole period when she was completing the exasperating paperwork of post-doc grant applications (none of them successful) and taking long bus journeys to the school, she considered using Meetic, but was deterred by the idea of coming across her father there. Instead, she opted for Tinder, a then-new dating app that had become all the rage. She wrote a description of herself, including a few pieces of false information so she wouldn’t be recognized, and added a profile photo taken from behind. It was almost like one of her father’s beheaded women. When she immediately started getting likes, she was concerned that the whole thing was so simple.

Her first date was with a man from Alcoy named Pepe who worked in Picassent and had a beachfront house in Marenyet. He was the production manager of a laboratory, had just turned thirty-nine, and had an attractive physique. She met him on each of her visits to Valencia. They didn’t have much to talk about and he wasn’t really the type of man she liked, but it had been so long since she’d been with anyone that she allowed herself to be pampered. Pepe’s beach house was modest, but had picture windows looking out onto the Mediterranean, which was so close to the patio she thought the sea would eventually swallow the house. There wasn’t even a boardwalk, just the sand and low dunes with sparce vegetation. Although right next door to the tourist hotspot of Cullera, Marenyet was an out-of-the-way sort of place where few people lived all year round. She and Pepe fucked on the terrace, on the couch, in bed, with the constant sound of the waves in the background. There was always a bottle of champagne and a box of Ferrero Rocher. It was all in slightly poor taste; what they did could have been used as an illustration in the sex tips section of an equally kitsch women’s magazine. Adriana was turned on by being a lead character in that story with its cheap, almost unreal paraphernalia. The sense of unreality brought the sex closer to her fantasies, even if she was bored afterward by the insipid conversation. Was Pepe really that bland, or was it that he didn’t want to give away anything about himself? Faced with his silence, she couldn’t come up with anything to say either. Maybe he was married and spent the summer with his wife and children in that same house. Or perhaps it was his permanent abode, although there were no signs of everyday life. He’d have to eat at work and have someone come in each morning to clean for the place to look as well-ordered and impersonal as a hotel suite.

She only ever spent a single night there at a time. Pepe came to meet her at the Joaquín Sorollo rail station and by nine they’d be at a restaurant in L’Estany, at the mouth of the freshwater lagoon, eating fish and drinking beer. The next day, he’d take her back to Valencia. Adriana would turn up at the family home, pretending she’d just gotten off the train. “Why won’t you let me meet you at the station? I always used to,” her father would ask solicitously. The excuses she invented were lame, but he was never suspicious. She’d stay with him the rest of the weekend and return to Madrid first thing Monday morning, going straight to the school where she had a temporary post. Pepe would insist on paying her fare whenever she announced a visit, and Adriana initially felt uncomfortable at the sight of the unsolicited train ticket in her inbox. The meal in the restaurant in L’Estany was a kind of luxurious foreplay, but she soon understood that it wasn’t done to impress her; he had an old-fashioned idea of gentlemanly behavior that he employed to compensate for his lack of confidence.

The relationship didn’t last long. They only saw each other once a month, from October to March, and the sense of unreality persisted. She had a good time, but the only things that really made an impression on her were the winding country lanes lined with oleander and bordered by cane fields, the simple, white house on a beach with old hilltop towers, cotton grass, and jonquils. And the moon, which she felt she’d never really taken much notice of before, and that shone there over the Mediterranean like some mysterious deity. The enchantment melted away the moment she set foot back in Valencia, where she vainly attempted to scare off Lady Death and Lady Manipulator. They would creep up silently to sit beside her in the living room, squeeze her hand and whisper fears of the future in her ear.

The meetings with Martina had dwindled to the point that there wasn’t enough time to get involved in her extravagant stories. That source of happiness couldn’t last because Adriana lived in Madrid and her father’s relationship with Martina was now carried out almost exclusively by telephone. He was too busy finding other women. Adriana thought it significant that on the few occasions when the three of them did meet, rather than have dinner on the terrace, enjoying the soft breeze and the smooth glow of the Albufera, they sat in the tiny, claustrophobic living room with its motley collection of furniture and photographs. Martina still greeted her with a “Hi, sweetheart” the moment she walked in, and the table would be already laid in the dining room, by the squirrel cage with its acrobatic noises. Her father and Martina would immediately return to their routine of dissecting his virtual dates and Adriana would feel bad about her own lack of candor. She could have told them about her affair with Pepe, so why was she still incapable of opening up?

The social media voices returned at full volume. When her thesis was finished, she returned to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but in a strange way: she hardly ever actively participated but began to look more frequently than she’d ever done and hold mental dialogues with the threads of those conversations, as if the replies weren’t comments made by other people but were related to her own thoughts. Sometimes she didn’t even check what the conversation was about, just choose a random intervention or a phrase, the end of a line of reasoning. That was easiest on Twitter. She liked following strangers; taking a look at their stories, and reading something she found interesting or true to life was enough of a response. She preferred those who used nicknames, so she knew nothing at all about the person: Migraine, Bakunin’s Flesh, Russia from Prussia, Venenossa. She was also a big fan of the illustrious dead: her timeline showed strings of quotes from Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Borges, and Teresa of Ávila, among others, all interchangeable and looking like they’d been taken from a self-help manual. Among these illustrious beings, her favorite was Simone de Beauvoir, who sent out phrases from The Second Sex into virtual space. Taken out of context, they made the author sound like a rampant misogynist.

She wasn’t trying to reach any conclusions about social networks. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could conclude anything that didn’t say more about herself than the world in general, so she just held inner conversations with that mob. “Emma is asking me what it feels like to shut down,” she read and then envisioned an Emma in conversation with someone on the verge of death and thought of her mother. Why was it that everything had come to a halt without her, while time continued its relentless forward march? In addition to functioning as an alert, had the death of a loved one produced some imperceptible effect? Had something in her body begun to die? She also watched video clips of traffic and airplane accidents, and, even more frequently, animals being stroked by their owners or other animals. She particularly liked bugs. All that got worse when she had to spend long days teaching teenagers; in the school corridors there were screens showing images on a loop of hardworking students wearing their maroon uniforms. The more experience she had of that learning environment, led by teachers imbued with a sense of their own self-importance, the more she spent the night pressing play on a video clip in which a little finger rubs the nose of a tiny hedgehog.

She sometimes thought social networks were to blame for her having gotten out of the habit of keeping a diary. She’d begun at the age of eleven, not as a record of the insignificant events of her life, but to set down a collection of adventures in the style of a Famous Five novel. She was writing the life she didn’t have and continued to do so into adolescence, when those diaries became confessionals and she began to toy with a combination of self-analysis and personal experiences duly embellished to shed a favorable light on her personality. In one of the posts on her timeline dedicated to literary greats, she read a quotation by Julio Ramón Ribeyro that said keeping a diary was a reaction to an unresolved problem but once a solution was found, the diary was meaningless. Could that apply to her? The truth was that she was increasingly less interested in her self-image. As far as she was concerned, that was a problem of adolescence and young adulthood, when identity is still a smoothie stirred obsessively with the straw so the mixture looks homogenous and tastes good. However much she seemed to find replies to her thoughts there, the hypothesis that she’d exchanged personal writing for the perusal of social networks was possibly going too far; she did, nevertheless, admit that the reflective—or neurotic—space offered by a diary was more often than not erased on the internet by a form of diffuse, opium haze of hope. She didn’t believe that the change produced by the virtual world had compensatory factors; it perhaps only replaced an earlier compulsion. And, whatever the case, that was now her world and she wasn’t willing to give it up. She wanted to go on hearing the voices, or perhaps just wasting time, escaping from time. Everything—opinions, information, historical events—would disappear in a few seconds, a few hours, sometimes a few days. Reality was melting away along with its aura of solidity, which had always been a human invention to distract from what was to come, from extreme light-mindedness. Although it could quite possibly be the other way around and the situation masked a tedious eternity in which beings were mired and immutable, without feeling or suffering, as certain religions preached.

Whenever she was interacting with someone, she had a sense of her own stupidity, and that there was no person behind the other’s words, that there was not another person but a merely digital existence, a spirit of the web. There were also days when she thought that if she spent a minute longer online, with all those inflammable judgements, she’d burn, as witches used to, even if she said nothing; it would happen as an effect of contemplating the hellish inferno that was others, who, when you came down to it, were a mirror. But if she found it all so inhospitable, why did she spend hours there like a dark animal of the abyss?

It was probably some old wound, a disability that had never been corrected. She never succeeded in normalizing Facebook or Twitter, just as she’d never been able to accustom herself to being in groups of people, to assuming her own presence among them. Exposing herself, being seen, was for her a violation. And for that reason, she preferred to enter into mental dialogue with the voices of her anonymous, illustrious dead: it was the pacific, dispassionate interaction she needed to feel safe.

Despite the fact that Pepe more than satisfied her curiosity about what it meant to have a “lover”—the word had started to sound old-fashioned, like all words having to do with love—and allowed her sips of the elixir of lightheartedness, something was urging her to become her own mediator on the matchmaker app. She had a few more dates; in Madrid she met a man from Burgos and a Chilean but got no further than coffees with either as she didn’t like them. Then came an Austrian—very handsome but cold as a fish—who took her to his hotel near Atocha station before she’d even decided if she wanted to have sex with him. The act made little impact on her; in fact she hardly noticed it. Afterward, they went to Huertas for a bocata de calamares. He told her that he’d been living in Mexico for six months, in Guanajuato; he said the city was growing upward because it was surrounded by hills and he liked to imagine that it was also expanding downward, into the bowels of the earth.

Adriana understood why people got hooked on dating sites, even when their experiences were depressingly inadequate: they offered a promise and a conquest to be ticked off, though maybe what she was doing—halfheartedly and to her own disgust—was following the furrow laid down by the stories of her father, Martina, and all the friends and acquaintances who’d been bending her ear, as if she needed to live those experiences, not just write them down.

Before leaving Tinder, she dated one last man, who she really did like, or so she believed. It was an open relationship, and, without giving it too much thought, she accepted the situation to check out just how much of a sucker she was: the only one who slept with other people was him. She tried to write a caricature of the story.

After five months together, during which she’d begun to build her hopes, Melibea found out that when she wasn’t in his bed at night, some other woman was. Although this situation didn’t initially seem to be to her advantage, it functioned as a stock excuse for her self-destructive impulses, for Lady Death. (“When there is no beauty, no splendor, no happiness, women choose the character of victim,” she read on a Twitter account dedicated to quotes by Simone de Beauvoir.) During the first month of her downward spiral, she took to walking the streets alone at night. She’d look up at balconies and windows; if she discovered that a single man lived in an apartment, she’d stand there for hours, spying on him. One of the men called the police and she only avoided ending up in a cell or a psychiatric emergency ward because she managed to give a convincing explanation.

She couldn’t continue: the caricature felt all too bitter. Although she’d sometimes told herself that everything she’d written could be an autobiography—life was nothing special and to tell it she needed other stories, whether invented or real—she set that idea aside now and said it was all just fiction. And that was partly true. The characters she invented were more alive than she was. Those Tinder dates had been only a feeble form of reanimation; deep down, she hadn’t stopped feeling like an anthropologist carrying out an experiment. It seemed that Lady Death was demanding her right to be present until the bitter end.

She thought about her father. How, despite the series of failures and even a bittersweet marriage, did he manage to be so profoundly alive?

“Dad, tell me your latest story,” she begged when she called him one night.

But her father wasn’t able to tell her anything that day. His relationships were becoming increasingly shorter; in his frantic search for a partner, he sometimes disappeared from the scene, even on occasions when she’d returned to Valencia to visit him. As the months passed, he widened his sphere of action: Zaragoza, Segovia, Ávila, León, Cadiz. He thought he’d used up every possible avenue in his search for a woman in the nearby provinces. “Don’t you think you’re making it all more difficult?” she asked. After a string of trips, her father didn’t have a cent to his name and asked her for a loan. Adriana was furious. Even though he returned the money soon afterward, Lady Manipulator used the full force of her artillery, threatening not to visit him again. But she was incapable of keeping up that threat for even two weeks. As always, she bought her train tickets in advance and she felt sorry for her father, who turned up to meet her at the station, shamefaced but with an impish grin. “Hi, sweetheart.” He made a point of not being absent during her visits and started to stay in cheap boarding houses rather than hotels on his journeys throughout the whole Iberian Peninsula to meet women who, he insisted, were in the same situation as him, longing for commitment. Adriana was by then certain that he wasn’t the least bit interested in commitment, even if he didn’t admit it to himself. And though she’d initially thought her father wouldn’t know how to get along without a woman at his side, she now understood that all his activity had become something else, an objective in itself, as if he was incapable of living peacefully and was fleeing from something that to her no longer seemed to be loneliness or the need for a partner. She was alarmed; her father wasn’t. For him, the quest still had an air of festivity, even if he was broke at the end of the month and used to forget to take his blood pressure medication with him on the trips. “You’ll have a stroke,” Adriano told him, unaware that her warning would come true. But he had no time for prophets of doom. His characteristic armor-plated good humor remained intact whatever the circumstance. The two of them were like the tale of the princess and the pea. Where was the perfect candidate for an elderly prince with a daughter wearing a permanent scowl? Adriana sometimes told herself that all the conclusions she came to about him were only related to herself. And Lady Death continued to turn up regularly to sit in an armchair in the living room and add to her tally of decadent acts and absences. It was paradoxical that death convened life—the trail of family members not seen in years who came to her mother’s funeral—and that, in spite of her efforts to meet existence head on, her present life was burdened by a strange form of emotional paralysis. A portrait of her maternal grandmother held pride of place in the living room; when she was in the armchair and raised her head, she’d meet her gaze. Her grandmother had always carried in the pocket of her housecoats a photo of her brothers, executed as adolescents during the civil war. Their bodies were never found, and that image, pasted onto strong cardstock, slept beside her for more than seventy years: her brothers, entombed in her body. Just how far do the dead travel with us?

II.

THE

HOUSE

Her mother was buried in her hometown. Adriana had known the cemetery since childhood, when she was taken there by her grandmother, who would always dress smartly for the occasion as laying flowers on graves was a social act. During their visits, they would usually come across some other woman who had gone to the holy ground at the same hour and her grandmother would invariably stiffen. She was a proud woman; when they reached the cemetery wall, she’d tell Adriana not to speak, perhaps because she needed silence to project her self-image or was afraid her granddaughter would say the wrong thing. If she got along with the person they met, there was a clear relaxation in her body and the tone of her voice. But if it was a stranger or someone she disapproved of, she’d walk straight-backed among the niches, every muscle in her body stiff as a ramrod like someone strapped in a torture chair, and utter a “Good afternoon” that could sound harsh, was definitely aloof, and occasionally held a touch of prudery. Adriana’s grandmother was the daughter of local gentry, and, although she had come down in the world, she maintained the manners of her social class.

The road to the cemetery was poorly paved, with gutters that filled with mud in winter, drystone walls, a few dilapidated cowsheds smelling of milk and dung, stalks of wheat and oats, and the spring flowers her grandmother would point out to her: bluebells, sweet Williams, hibiscus, poppies, hedge mustard. To the east was a plain and there were meadows on the western side, with distant mountains that sometimes looked blue or could be greenish, or even violet. The barking of unfriendly mastiffs as they passed frightened Adriana, and if it looked like rain, she’d be surprised to see the high boots her grandmother wore; she’d always thought of her as the epitome of an old lady. The boots were feminine, with lowish heels, and provoked the strange idea that her grandmother had once been a young woman and that sensuality still lingered in her white, unwrinkled flesh. It was a fleeting image: limited to the moment her grandmother raised her skirt slightly to put on the boots, giving a glimpse of her stockings and thighs. Then she went back to being an elderly lady of undoubted sobriety: petite, slender, and with few gray hairs for her age.

After the age of nine or ten, Adriana stopped accompanying her grandmother to the cemetery. She continued going there, but on her own or to play with her friends among the tombs. She’d taken the place for granted until the deaths in the family began: first her grandfather, followed by a cousin who’d been like a brother, then came her mother’s and her grandmother’s demises. Suddenly the graveyard became almost intimate due to the need to tend her dead, the timelessness that was her responsibility. She’d visit the graves in genealogical order: her great-grandparents, Leopoldo and Lucía—her grandfather’s parents—followed by Bartolomé and Altagracia—great-grandparents on the maternal side. Then she’d move on to the tombs of her grandparents, Antonio and Adriana, after whom she was named, and her uncle Filipe, although she had only a vague memory of him. After that, she’d spend a good while with her mother, who used to hate the name Eulalia, but loved being called Lali: that’s what was written on her tomb. The tour finished up with her cousin Fernando. She liked to check that the niches were still there, identically silent; to take a peek into the charnel house, with its coffins and rotting funeral wreaths, and from that height—the charnel house was reached by a steep flight of irregular steps that looked like they had been hewn out of the rock—gaze over the fields and up to the sometimes clear, sometimes overcast sky. She felt she belonged in that place and, although death scared her, she found nothing funereal about it; rather, she had a sense of liberation, was at peace with the idea that it would one day be her place too: a small niche, a simple, conventional headstone, beautiful in its modesty and artificial white roses.

The consciousness of the departure of her loved ones had made her feel thoroughly in tune with the state of her grandmother’s house, left empty after she developed dementia and moved to an old folks’ home. The family hadn’t yet managed to sell it. Adriana rarely visited now, despite having been raised there. Her mother had left her in her grandmother’s care when she was just six months old, and she’d experienced that house like an enormous body, the body that saw her birth, usurping that of her mother. Until starting school, she spent more time there than with her parents, who worked such long hours that looking after a child as well was a near impossibility. Or so went the official explanation. In fact, Adriana had always believed—had really felt—that it had been her mother’s way of returning vicariously to the small town and the house she had left at the age of seven to live with a paternal uncle in Badajoz, where she could go to school. Later, she’d moved farther and farther away—Seville, Granada, Málaga, Gerona—to study, work, and marry. Although she tried, she never managed to get back to her native soil and hadn’t allowed herself to be intimidated by anyone when it came to leaving Adriana with her grandmother so soon after her birth. It made no difference to her that they said she didn’t want to be bothered with her daughter; she was offering that child the gift of the fullness of experience she’d had, something a girl rarely finds in the city. When Adriana went back to live with her parents to start school, the bond with her grandparents was unbroken, and in fact became even stronger. She continued to spend the Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations with them. For years, the enormous, mysterious house and the surrounding countryside was her playground. She was free to go whenever she liked, with hardly any vigilance, and was required only to be home for meals.

From a young age, she slept in a room that led off from another and had no windows; it wasn’t unusual in small towns to have rooms that seemed to be carved out of the rock. Her earliest memories of that cavernlike room dated from when she was three and her grandmother would wake her at dawn and take her to the kitchen to tend to the stove. She put sheets of newsprint between the firewood and lit it all with matches. Adriana would watch the flames in a kind of ecstatic trance.

In addition, her grandparents had a sixty-acre homestead, called El Mirto, where they grew cereal crops; there was also a garden with a fig tree, chickens, and a few olive trees. The farmhouse was a very old cottage with a chimney, two or three rooms, a few pieces of ancient, cast-off, rough-hewn furniture.

When Adriana went to the town as a child, she entered another world. Very little shopping was done; their food came from El Mirto, from the slaughter of domestic animals, and the hares and doves her grandfather hunted that were then cooked with rice. At dusk, they went to the cowshed for unpasteurized milk, which then had to be boiled. Clothes were repaired. Shoes were sent to the cobbler. Her grandmother’s dresses were made by a lame seamstress who always stuck pins in Adriana when she was taking her measurements. Everything had some value. Bread was eaten until it became rock hard and was then thrown into the pot of chicken feed. If she didn’t finish her meal, her grandparents would force themselves to eat the leftovers so nothing was thrown out. The trauma of the scarcities of the war and post-war periods was still vivid. The only heating in the house was a single under-table charcoal burner and a couple of gas stoves in the bedrooms. In winter, it was so cold that they’d get chilblains on their hands and would be able to see their breath ploughing a furrow in the air whenever they entered a room, shivering.

Their needs were basic because they were used to living that way and had experienced poverty, a word her grandmother pronounced with horror. Although in better days they’d had domestic staff, the squandering of consumer society was unthinkable to them, and there were never any impulse purchases when they went to the store. They always bought the same things; the exact same shopping list month after month, year after year.

Her grandfather was a physician’s assistant who, in addition to doing consultations at the house, visited his patients in their homes. He tirelessly walked long distances, his boots always caked in mud. During the conflict, he was a second lieutenant and then a full lieutenant, but he never served at the front; his task was to treat wounds. He amputated arms and legs with a hatchet, administering brandy to the soldiers as an anesthetic. In town he practiced as a doctor rather than an assistant because there was nobody else. He also attended births and extracted teeth; when he did the latter, the howls were so awful that she and her grandmother would have to go out into the yard and close the door to shut them out.

She remembered the intensity of flavors and that things were special because they weren’t constantly available. So, tomatoes in summer, after almost a whole year without tomatoes, or the asparagus that grew in the beds in the garden. That special quality may only have existed for her because she was a child, because she’d experienced it during that long period of discovering the world.

The house was always scrupulously neat and clean. A glass lying on the table would have her grandmother grumbling, “Who’s left that here?” Things were immediately put back in the correct place after use, not just due to a mania for order but from a sense of the dignity of the objects themselves. However modest, they were kept in prime condition. Those objects were old, made from materials intended to last. In that timeless environment, a plastic bag or Styrofoam tray felt like a scream.

Her grandmother had just one luxury: flowers. The yard was filled with planters. That vegetal exuberance was her pride and joy, her only concession to material excess, and was tended with great care. “Child, come and see the flowers in the yard,” she’d say to her. She never called her by her name; she was “the child.” “I’m going upstairs to the storeroom, child. Are you coming?” There was no reason why her grandmother would want her there other than to be together among all the relics of the past, as if she wanted to show her it all, include her in her memory of those relics. Adriana used to gaze at the cradle her mother had slept in. It was an airy room, gave the impression of being outdoors, but there was some ghostly obstacle that limited her curiosity. The objects were heaped in unsteady piles under quilts and cobwebs. The high ceiling showed the structure of the roof, the wooden beams and thatch. The windows seemed old, made of thin panes of scratched glass with tiny cracks, like the wrinkles on the face of a centenarian. There were rat traps everywhere: cracked wood, rusty metal, a piece of dry cheese. Right at the top of the steep staircase with its uneven steps—an ascent that reminded her of a mountain path to a clear, icy region—was the first trap, and then would come her grandmother’s panicked squeal, somehow convinced she’d get her foot caught in the trap.

Each room had its own particular odor. It made no difference what else was done in there: smoking, putting on perfume, or spraying bug repellent. The odor of the room quickly did away with any invaders. In the same way the solidity of the space allowed its beauty to persist despite changes made in dubious taste and with zero expenditure, the odor of each room obliterated any trace of others. The origins of those smells lay in the activities that had been carried out in them for decades. So her grandfather’s consulting room retained a permanent, subtle note of antiseptic years after his death, and the cupboard where the queso añejo was kept went on smelling of cheese long after anything had been stored in it.

She also knew the smell and feel of the floor, although it would have been more exact to say floors, as none of them were the same. She used to lie down on them to play among her plastic dolls and the tiny insects, and in summer she’d rest her cheek there to feel the coarse cold of the handcrafted mosaic tiles, the grainy irregularities of the granite, the biting chill of the terrazzo, the smoothness of the marble. She’d sometimes lie face down to inhale the smells of bleach, detergent, and something earthy, like a rotting organic blanket.

The yard, the sky, the roof. The strange places like the privy, where she started locking herself away in her teenage years to smoke and read sexually explicit stories in magazines. A large house has hiding places.

The privy was one of the first toilets in the town, and was in the yard. There was no cistern so you had to go to the well for a bucket of water, and it was unlit except for a skylight. Years passed before her grandparents ran electricity out there.

She’d also go to what had once been a chicken run but that, when she was a child, was only used for hanging clothes out to dry. She examined the empty hencoops and the long, raised bed full of soil where rubble was dumped whenever any work was done on the house.

She liked being there on her own. She’d pull off the moss growing on the stone wall or climb up onto a granite structure, something like a dolmen, and look at the roof. A prolonged inspection of the tiles gave her the sense of unexpectedly looking at an unknown place. She’d immerse herself in that strangeness, pierced by the comically prolonged chirping of some bird, as if the duration of the sound was tracing out a line in the air.

But most of all, it was the silence that she listened to. She crouched in it, stalked it. She’d be aware of something essential to the very nature of time whenever she was quiet in some solitary place; the reaction of the other members of the household was a single question: “Child, what are you doing there?”

Sometimes, when she was observing the tiny white flowers of a weed growing between the cobbles, she’d be amazed by that perfection in miniature, amazed to discover that the world was still so precise on a scale so small it was close to invisible.

Inside the house, there were more strange places that she frequented with the same inquiring fervor, as if the spaces were going to offer her some key, or every possible experience was contained there. It was just a matter of finding them. To do that, you had to place yourself in exactly the right position, had to know how to inhabit them. In the dovecote, a pair of turtledoves were fattening. They were gamebirds and would end with their crops pierced by buckshot. When her grandmother took the doves out in small cages at dawn, she’d go to spy on the empty space, to sound it out.

There were also totally unchartered places. The ones nobody ever visited, as if they didn’t belong to them: blind spots, their existence denied. For example, in the upper part of the car shed there was a space they called the hayloft that extended into a nook around a corner, beyond the reach of the electric light. They never went there. The nook was always in semi-darkness, jutting out several feet into the neighbor’s yard, giving the impression that the building was covertly attempting to conquer other spaces, or even escape from itself.

She was also adept at finding strange locations outside the house. There was the alley where the trash cans were kept that had an uncovered drain hole into which any old lady could fall down into the filth. Out-of-the-way places where you only ever found boys passing around a joint or the occasional dead animal, crawling with maggots, that someone had dumped there.

That was where she learned to roam. She was allowed to go out alone, unsupervised, from the time she was six or seven. She often cycled through the streets, continually surprised by their changes of light, the impression they gave depending on whether it was morning or afternoon. She preferred being outdoors when there was no one else around because she didn’t want to be seen: part of learning about freedom consisted of knowing how to hide yourself so you weren’t under anyone’s control. She’d seek out new places to get lost in, different situations. Coming face-to-face with the world on her own was her way of deciphering it.

At the rear of the house there was the false door, as it was called, that could be reached from the street by going up a slope: the ascent was almost spiritual. Without knowing quite why, Adriana would feel a physical elevation, a deep discomfiture, along with the texture of sand under her shoes when she was on that cracked cement street, repaired hundreds of times, where cars and tractors circulated.

She’d find beauty where none existed, before any notion of beauty had been instilled in her. And no other place offered so vast a universe, although she knew that it didn’t have to do with the house but was the nature of families and childhood.

She also lived with religious excess, the strict routine of mass, the rosary at six o’clock, the prayer book. At a very young age, she learned to tolerate the daily novena. When she drowsed on the cold, hard church pews, her grandmother would sometimes jerk her upright. She remembers doing the Stations of the Cross afterward and asking what was going on, and she’d stop in front of the image of Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory, carefully inspecting Purgatory, the souls her grandmother prayed to before bed, asking them to wake her at seven in the morning, which they did. Adriana would imagine those faceless souls in their black tunics. A prolonged, pained murmuring.

In recent years, she’d very frequently found herself mentally touring the rooms of that house because she had a precise memory of them that was her safeguard at any time, in any situation. She’d call up an image of herself passing through the front door into the hallway, with the chairs where her grandfather’s patients used to wait. Those chairs were left empty when he stopped practicing, well past the official retirement age. Nobody used them until summer arrived and townsfolk would stop by to pass the time of day with her grandmother; she used to sit outside in a wicker armchair to get a breath of fresh air and would bring the less comfortable chairs onto the sidewalk for her visitors. Adriana particularly remembered the foyer with its vaulted ceiling and arabesque ornamentation, and doors leading to six rooms, some with frescos—pastoral scenes, shepherd boys playing flutes, a river with a tower in the distance like the Torre del Oro in Seville. And the marble staircase to the upper floor, where there were three bedrooms, and the boarded-up door to the storeroom. More doors led off the living room, but it was the front part of the house that gave it its stately air and, above all, its mystery. A set of double doors separated the entrance hall from the foyer and as she crossed that threshold, she could feel the depth of the place, the unsettling, expectant stillness of all the rooms. The vaulted ceilings made the space seem to ascend upward, just like in churches. Each and every time she passed through that place was an initiation, but it was only now, on recalling it, that she realized the extent to which that passage through the foyer prepared her for her arrival in the familial universe, for taking it onboard organically, from the body—the body of the house absorbing hers. The world was now other: it had reached its own center and its own profundity while her feet were advancing happily over the mosaic tiles. Every one of her cells still harbored those footsteps, the aroma, the air, the sensation of the house with its nuanced meanings. In the summertime, it smelled of the jasmine her grandmother placed around the statue of the Sacred Heart that dominated the place, along with the ferns, rocking chairs, and aspidistras.

The most powerful thing about the house was that every room held a family secret, and the measure of the secret was given by the shadows and the duration it had been shut in there. There was no way of penetrating to the heart of the place—the living room, where all the secrets gathered—without first crossing through the darkness, without sensing its viscous material, the vast silence. The space they called the drawing room, which contained a portrait of her great-grandmother Altagracia, was like a sepulcher. That was where Altagracia’s ghost, her memory, slumbered: the blood of her two eldest sons, the horror of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Adriana had once been stopped by a woman in the street who said, “I think what was done to them was wrong. They weren’t to blame. They were children.” The tragedy coexisted with a family legend that time had made comical: her great-grandmother had died after eating an entire roast lamb in one sitting. And in the same vein was the story of what had happened in the bed of one of the closed rooms: the whole house was shaken by the impure act. As were the plates shattering on the floor, the husband arriving back drunk, the shouts, and the children wetting themselves with fright. An echo remained of what no longer existed, of its density. Dark matter.

The house expanded inward. There was always one more pantry, one more unexpected, enigmatic room behind another. All that in contrast to the flowers in the yard and the richness of their colors. In their almost anarchic layout, Adriana sensed a flourishing that signaled an unknown freedom, like something that grows any which way.

Everything that hadn’t been spoken, the reverberation of those old, windowless, cavernous bedrooms, continued until she was three or four: a multitude of voices, drowning each other out, sound converted into mass that weighed her down as it entered her body. It used to happen in the upstairs bedroom, when she slept with her parents on their visits to her grandmother’s house. Afterward, those voices that came to her in the mornings and at night, grazing her light, semiconscious sleep, disappeared. They returned only once more, in the same bed, when she was twenty-two. It was during summer vacation, after she’d taken a few of tokes on a joint. Two tokes won’t have much effect, she thought, despite the emphasis the person who offered her the joint put on the trippy effects of that particular weed. That night—since adolescence, she’d slept upstairs, in the same bedroom where the voices had assailed her in the past—the moment she lay her head on the pillow, they returned to visit her. It wasn’t a dream or a hallucination. She repeatedly followed the same routine: sitting up, switching on the light, switching it off, and putting her head back on the pillow. The instant the light was out, and she leaned back, the voices started, and then immediately disappeared again when she lifted her head and switched on the light. She must have spent fifteen or twenty minutes sitting up and lying back, with a sense of chilly alienation, a spectator of herself. She wasn’t scared, there was no feeling that she was going crazy. She just wanted to figure out what was happening, the mechanism that clicked in when she switched off the light and put her head on the pillow, and she was curious about what they were saying, as she didn’t understand any of it. She experienced a throwback in time, as if the child Adriana and her nightmare were taking possession of her. She didn’t want to pass the whole night that way, but was certain it wasn’t any form of psychosis, just communication with the past, or possibly with something that was in the bedroom.

Her grandmother began to show symptoms of dementia at the age of ninety-two after being hospitalized with arrhythmia. It was in the hospital that her head went wrong; she kept saying she was in the yard of her house, late at night, because one of the children had locked the door and wouldn’t let her in. She shouted that she’d been left out there in the yard, and there was no way of persuading her that she was in a bed. When she was allowed to go home, she only partially recovered. All of a sudden, she’d forgotten how to cook—even letting her fry an egg was risky—and at night she was afraid of dying or that someone would break in and carry her off. She heard voices; Adriana sometimes speculated that they might be the same ones that had haunted her. A number of caregivers visited, but she thought they were burglars coming to rob her, particularly after dark, when the bird of fear perched on her chest. She hurled insults at them, wouldn’t allow them to feed her. None of them lasted longer than two or three days. What can you do with a screwy woman?

They put her in a home run by nuns, where she ended up losing her mind altogether. She thought the other old women were her former neighbors and the corridors the streets. She had an obsession about two boys who, she claimed, were waiting for her in the countryside. She had to put them to bed. She shared a room with Niña Pepi, an elderly paralytic, deaf mute and with learning difficulties whom the nuns had taken in at the age of seven. She’d been in the home for seventy years without saying a word, her mouth open, and the strange look of an elderly, undernourished war child. Adriana’s grandmother quite literally saw a little girl, no doubt influenced by the way everyone called the woman Niña Pepi. That childish nickname conditioned her perception. “What a pretty little girl,” she’d say, standing by her bed.

When Adriana visited, she’d go to the dining room with her grandmother and sit opposite a woman whose mind was also wandering but who said things that were extremely rational. While her grandmother was talking about the dead as if they were alive—“We have to go to Ca L’Antonia,” she’d say, or “My husband will be here soon,” or “Yesterday, I went to El Mirto with my brother Casimiro.”—the woman who shared her table would respond in a loud, solemn voice, like an echo, “I don’t know if I have a father, mother, grandparents, or siblings. I can’t remember anything. I’m hollowed out.” Those words showed foresight. Her grandmother wasn’t yet “hollowed out”: she was possessed by the ghosts of the past, was still made up of pieces of her loved ones. What would become of her if her memories were totally wiped out?

Although she no longer recognized her favorite grandchild, she did know that Adriana was a family member. That was enough. She was interchangeable with any of her descendants. Adriana seemed to perceive a truth there: that more than individuals, we are points of confluence for everything that precedes us.

The house was put on the market when her grandmother moved out. There were times when Adriana thought she wouldn’t be able to bear its loss. She began to feel she’d constructed a life based on untruths that she used as a cover for what she really was: an extension of the house and family memory. She asked herself, as her mother had done before her, whether it had been the right decision not to settle there; not to lead a life so similar to her grandparents’, with the sound of their footsteps and their breathing, a life that would hold a touch of madness since she had no present there, was only maintaining a past from which she hadn’t yet untethered herself, that still controlled her, if only in a tenuous way, mediated by her own will. Because the more she recreated that childhood home, the more conscious she was of being able to do without it. The umbilical cord was wearing thin, or maybe there had never been one, just a habit. Whenever she reached that conclusion, she took a step back and reprimanded herself. If she gave up her ties, wasn’t she condemning herself to a colorless existence, to the loss of something irreplaceable? Or maybe that thought was just fierce resistance to the idea that nothing was irreplaceable because homes did indeed replace one another, people replaced one another; it was the cycle of life, and she was refusing to accept it. Why couldn’t she be comforted by the notion that, in fact, nothing was so important?

Her grandmother died before becoming completely hollowed out. She never forgot her son Felipe, the one with Down syndrome, or the boys who had been left in the countryside. When Adriana asked her uncle if those boys had ever existed, he said they were two cousins her grandmother had taken under her wing eighty years before.

What she did forget, to Adriana’s surprise, was the house.

Shortly before his stroke, Adriana and her father visited her mother’s grave, and a number of things happened on that trip; definitive changes that, even though they weren’t related to her father, later seemed to Adriana forewarnings of his illness and a worsening of the chain of disappearances that had invaded their lives, as if they had both taken one more fatal step up the staircase Lady Death had set before them. Who would have thought that for him it was a farewell to the carefree good humor of his still healthy body? Two weeks later the embolism struck.

Her father had always visited the town against his will. He had no experience with rural life and had never understood the harsh existence of Adriana’s maternal grandparents, whom he used to refer to as the “Puerto Hurraco family,” in reference to a small-town massacre back in 1990 that had entered popular culture.

“When you die, do you want to be buried with Mom?” she ventured to ask during the trip.

“Yes. Anyhow, I’ll be dead, so it makes no difference where I am.”

After the five-hour drive to the province of Badajoz, on their arrival in the valley, they found the countryside scorched by drought. It was October, four months had passed since the last rains, and the mountains they drove through, usually green even in high summer, were completely dried out. Only the pines still retained some color. The yellow of the pastureland was hallucinogenic, supernatural, as if the lack of water and the unrelenting sun had caused the spectrum of the undergrowth to reach its extreme there. Or as if it was possible to be part of the total absence of rain, and everything had become a carcass that only needed a slight puff of air to reduce it to dust, to nothing. Except for the pine trees and the holm oaks, which looked like writhing rocks in the midst of the desolation, everything was the same yellow as the sun, an identical destructive fury. Rather than a Dantesque landscape, that apocalypse was the discreet unspectacular death of the valley; it seemed like the space had been reduced, that the earth was capable of offering only a meager, defenseless image of itself. Plundered, wretched, feeble, as happens to the terminally ill. During the descent into the valley, Adriana found less beauty in those beloved places that had always seemed infinitely open. Now she had the impression that there were precise limits, beyond which there was nothing to be seen.

The town also seemed to have aged. And when she crossed the threshold of her grandmother’s house, whose facade displayed an austere beauty despite the yellowing “For Sale” sign on the balcony, the interior seemed to have shrunk. The ceilings weren’t as high or the coolness as pronounced. The silence wasn’t veiling profundity; it was mere emptiness, like the emptiness of an old wardrobe that is about to be thrown out. It felt more like a century than a year since she’d last visited. The house was decimated by the lack of life, deprived of its mystery.

She attempted to localize elements that had previously given density to the space. Such as the plants: ferns, aspidistras, a money tree, devil’s ivy, a philodendron, begonias, rose bushes, a marvel of Peru, the palm tree, white daisies, a lilac tree that had a sweet scent in summer, jasmine, geraniums they called “sardines,” carnations, asparagus plants, water lilies, parsley. There was no sign of the lushness that had been distributed around the house and the yard, embellishing the environment and adding an extra dimension, making the place it occupied visible and larger. The chairs and couch were draped with those uninviting sheets that always produce a sense of abandonment. But their visit was short. They spent only one night; she wasn’t able to wander at ease through the rooms, absorbing them, and she didn’t go into the kitchen, with its enormous hearth and pantry. There were no raised beds in the yard and a part of the chicken run had been sold to a neighbor, so the drystone Adriana had climbed as a child was no longer there, leaving a plain wall.

But the greatest difference was that the rooms seemed to have lost their secrets. If she’d been able to sleep upstairs—an impossibility as all the beds had been removed—the voices wouldn’t have come as she dozed.

“Ay, child, who would have thought it?” her grandmother had often said during her final decade, surprised by the increasingly pronounced silence as her husband, children, siblings, and visiting friends died, until nobody was left to call on her in the afternoons. “Who would have thought it?” she’d repeat. It seemed like the future she’d dreamed of had been substituted by a present that was unimaginable, not for being in any way out of the ordinary but for its normality, its predictability. That question expressed her absolute amazement at the disappearance of the life that had been hers, of the loved ones who had been part of it and whom she relied on, and the surprising thing is that their disappearance had no consequences. Life continued without them.

Adriana didn’t only miss the voices in the rooms, but also her mother’s and grandmother’s. They only survived inside her, mixed with her own voice, almost imaginary, like those anecdotes for which she invented extensions.

Why was it that, all this time, she’d made up stories about other people rather than writing about her maternal world? What was she afraid of?

III.

THE

VOICES

DAUGHTER: That bearded man—he was a journalist—appeared just before Christmas. On the first day, I got things wrong; I thought he was a sad person, but that wasn’t so, it turned out he was a married man whose relationship wasn’t working out. He wore that hangdog expression so someone would take pity on him. It was calculated. Not purposefully, but by instinct. He’d have had great difficulty recognizing that.

GRANDMOTHER: My mother-in-law was frightened when the airplanes started flying overhead. She’d throw herself on the floor and scream. Some claimed she had epilepsy. If anyone in the square said, “Lucía, a plane!” she’d shriek and run back to the house. She was visiting her family in the city when the Civil War broke out, and couldn’t return because there was shooting on the highway every day. She stayed with her sister, who lived across the street from the Military Hospital. Bombs were falling all around. It was as if the massacre had no other object than pure revenge, or that’s what she said. It made no difference that they dropped fliers warning of the bombings. What use were they if you didn’t have a safe place to go? There wasn’t a single bomb shelter. My mother-in-law witnessed the Military Hospital being destroyed. She used to say that a madman hung around the remains of the building for two days afterward, blood on his face and one eye missing, saying it was the coming of God. I don’t know why so many planes flew over the town in the post-war period. I remember that they came in quite low, that the noise hung in the air. No one was as upset by it as my mother-in-law.

MOTHER: I’d go to the highway with a girlfriend to smoke a cigarette and we’d take deep drags, making ourselves dizzy. I had only two dresses: one for winter and another for summer. So I used to go to the university every day wearing that dress you can see in the photo. I was twenty when it was taken, in the winter of 1965. The dress was green, and I wore a sweater over it. Sweaters were so itchy in those days. I took it off for the photo and brushed my hair. You had to pose properly for a photograph back then. When I was studying my specialty, one of my colleagues bought a Polaroid and took pictures of me and the others every day; so I got used to not posing for the camera, but then I’d come out looking horrible, with my eyes closed, and I’d wish I had. But that colleague was a pest with his camera; you couldn’t always be at his beck and call. And all those photos looked faded. I preferred black and white. Reality already had plenty of color. There was something theatrical about black and white, as if we were acting out a version of ourselves that improved us or made us more mysterious.

DAUGHTER: Though later, he told me that he’d checked me out on Facebook. My profile picture had caught his eye. I was like a cat that spends the afternoon curled up in some warm spot. The first time he saw me lying on the couch, he said he’d been right: I was in fact like that imaginary cat who spends the whole afternoon in some warm spot; on a cushion by a radiator, for instance. He was the sort of man who was always repeating the same words and even whole phrases. His favorite word was “dainty.” The cat he imagined from my Facebook profile was dainty and, according to him, I was dainty too, like a cat that spends the whole afternoon on a cushion, and so on.

MOTHER: Before the war, missionaries came to the town. That’s the word that comes to me now, although I don’t think there were really any missionaries in small towns. Missionary doesn’t even seem to me like a word I’ve ever used when talking about those times. What’s going on with me and words? The point is that those missions were all the rage with many of the pious women, who got even more sanctimonious. And my grandmother Lucía was already going to mass every day and saying rosaries; her children were sick of it. Grandfather Leopoldo used to drink a lot. That’s what they say. I never knew him, but they’ve told me so. Grandfather Leopoldo and Grandmother Lucía didn’t get along. He’d been accused of homosexuality. He used to teach in the veterinary school, and one of the other professors was a close friend. Word began to get around that they were queer. You can imagine what that meant in a provincial city crammed with churches. He had to give up his job and take refuge in a one-horse town. And he stayed here. No wonder he turned to alcohol.

DAUGHTER: The bearded man. That’s not how you start an affair, a friend told me. Get him out of your home, she said, and then he can rent somewhere for when it’s his turn to have the children. How are you going to cope with a couple small girls?

MOTHER: If I hadn’t won a scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to study. There were only two other women in the class; the rest were men. I was doing medicine. The degree my father hadn’t been able to complete. In fact, I graduated cum laude. Only a few students received that grade, and I was one of them. Every time we had an exam, I’d be in tears and would phone my aunt—never my mother, much less my father, who wouldn’t have understood why I was wasting money on long-distance. You told the operator you wanted to make a long-distance call to a certain place and gave her the number. Those operators could hear everything. I’d be crying because I was certain I was going to flunk. Do you understand what that meant? I’d have lost my scholarship and been a failure in my father’s eyes. Does that give you some idea of what it was like to be the first woman from a small town to go to college in the ’60s? But I’ll stick to the point. There was no reason for me to think I’d flunk anything. That wasn’t why I was crying. If I’d read Freud, I’d have known the name my problem would have been given in early-twentieth-century Vienna: anxiety neurosis. But this isn’t a thought my voice should express. My voice has to be unaware of such things.

GRANDMOTHER: My mother-in-law started wearing a chastity belt. I’d have liked one too. Nobody ever saw that belt, but it was well known she wore it because of my father-in-law’s shouting. When his shouts died down, no one was certain if it was because she’d stopped wearing the belt or he’d stopped trying to sleep with her. There were no whores here, but there were maids. And some of them let the masters of the house have their way so they wouldn’t be thrown out. But this is something I shouldn’t have said. This knowledge is forbidden to me, even though everybody surely knew it, including me, from firsthand experience, but not using the words I’ve just spoken. Those words aren’t in the nature of what I know, though they do come close. Women like me learned things without words; we just felt uneasy if one of the maids was particularly young, and we tried to ensure that she was always close by. Those maids left a sinister smell behind them, and I was never sure if they’d gone to bed at the end of the day. I was afraid of coming across them in some corner of the house. First, I was afraid of bandoleros and then of the maids who accompanied me to mass, carried my kneeler, and helped to place the black veil on my head. I’ll say it again, I had personal experience of what I said just now, what happened between the maids and the masters. The whole town found out. There was a difference between those who knew silently and those who talked. The silence was like the maids huddled in my home in the middle of the night, when I was still young. Every bedroom was full of maids, and my feet would be ice cold and painful in winter when I woke at dawn and went looking for them. I only ever found ferrets. My husband’s ferrets used to escape during the night and go from cupboard to cupboard in search of chorizo. I’d have liked to put down rat poison for them, but he’d have known it was me. And, anyway, the poisoned chorizo might have ended up in the mouth of one of my children.

MOTHER: I had to attend an eye operation and I fainted right away. That’s when I realized I couldn’t be a surgeon. They were beginning to do cosmetic surgery for the rich back then, but I wasn’t even able to watch the eyeball of a corpse being cut open, so that wasn’t an option. That was before my father decided my specialty for me. I could have done anything I wanted, except for surgery because I fainted at the sight of the corpse they were dissecting, right in front of the professor and the whole class. I considered neurology, internal medicine, and psychiatry, but when it came to the moment to choose, my father decided on pediatrics. He said I was a woman so it would be ridiculous to do anything else. Women and children first. My father’s shame on watching me futilely attempting to exercise authority outside of my natural sphere as a woman began to seep through the windows of the medical school. I was an embarrassment to the town, it seemed like everyone in the square, in the social club, or behind their lace curtains was asking what I was doing, saying I should quit the university, and those voices passed through my father’s ears and reached me with all their fury; you’d think I’d become a hired killer instead of a medical student. But those words aren’t mine; I’d never have made such a comparison, and I also knew my father was proud of me, despite his shame. Years later, when I understood things better, I’d have said that my father was a man of his time, and that apart from the period he spent in the provincial city, also studying medicine—the war prevented him from graduating—he’d never been beyond those streets where women just cleaned, gave birth, and were left widows or spinsters, or at very most entered a convent or became teachers. Well, that’s what I’d have said years later. At that moment, I only regretted having wanted to occupy an unsuitable position for a woman.

DAUGHTER: The bearded man. I wrote quite a few bad poems to him. Poems in which I unburdened myself, sentimental, kitsch poems, but through which I was able to feel and understand things I didn’t know how to express in any other way. I don’t believe in catharsis as the motor of a text, or not the prime motor, so even when I’m full of enthusiasm for the poems, I know they are trash because what I’m doing is getting things off my chest. But it could be that the language I sometimes feel is most appropriate to what I write, most authentic (that disgusting adjective), is the falsest and what I find false is the truest. Truth and falsity are problematic concepts. False or true to what? I’ll probably never get anywhere if I stop at every word. The meaning of literature is what I’ve been taught its meaning is, with its corresponding negations. Everything contains its opposite. Transgression foregrounds a norm. And, in any case, it’s impossible to know when you’re making literature because you don’t know what literature is, not due a lack of something but from excess: there are too many competing definitions. But I wanted to get to my poems. Here’s one:

This door should be left open,
you said.

From the hallway came a narrow silence
clouding my pupils with sleep.

I saw you crossing the threshold
of what should remain closed, as it’s a frontier
on which you turned your back when you called to me,
using a word that, according to you,
would excite no other woman in the world.

We both know that there was a function behind that phrase,

“no other woman in the world,”

and also behind that other one you often said and I believed:

“we’ll give them a masterclass in love.”

And you turned to pronounce tenderly,
as it could only sound on your lips for me to receive,
only woman in the world and so on,
a bauble, nothing more,
the only word for which we can find no companion:

rat.

GRANDMOTHER: People are always trying to get words out of me. It’s not that I believe things are better unsaid; the past just doesn’t interest me. It used to, although never for very long because I soon had children and too much to do. But this is a logical explanation and there’s no logic in my forgetting. And anyway, I don’t like it when people go around prying. When they pry, it’s always about something bad. There’s no such thing as healthy curiosity, only idiots believe that. I’m being made to talk in a way I don’t recognize, I’m saying things I’d never have said because I wouldn’t have known how to say them, my language is simpler, my head is simpler, if something has no use, it goes. After a certain age, anything that happens is a miracle. Your sentence is cast very early. Before forty. Maybe at thirty. For me it was twenty. And I can firmly state it was for the best because it stopped me from desiring. Becoming frustrated. I’ve always had everything I wanted because what I wanted was what I got. This is what I had:

A husband who was a physician’s assistant.

Two maids.

A house in the main square of town, which was a wedding present from my father.

A studious, talkative, oldest daughter.

A diligent second daughter, full of pranks.

A kind, calm third child, a son.

A brave, sporty younger son.

A witless youngest son. They call it Down syndrome nowadays.

Doing the laundry in the tub on Mondays, with the help of a maid.

Daily cleaning, with the help of another maid.

Daily meals, the menu decided by my husband and cooked by me.

Taking the children to school, also done by one of the maids.

Preparing whatever produce came from the farm. Tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, carrots, beetroot, watermelons, French beans. In summer, canning tomatoes and peppers.

Waiting at midday for my husband, who would turn up in a state I prefer not to talk about.

Eating meals while trying to ensure none of my children cried or wet themselves when they saw their father in that state. My witless son was the only one who used to laugh, as if he was seeing something different.

Ensuring that none of my children made a noise while my husband was taking his siesta.

Waiting in silence for my husband to leave the house in the afternoon.

Letting my children play.

Getting ready to go to mass.

Going to mass with the maid.

Making dinner for my children and putting them to bed.

Having dinner myself.

Going to bed with my girdle on so my husband won’t touch me.

Hearing my husband come in at half past midnight. He used to make noise taking out the bread and the warm food from the table drawer, which squeaked.

Falling asleep before my husband came to bed.

That went on for a long time and then there were variations, such as:

My eldest daughter went to study in the city, staying with her paternal uncle.

The young maid began to develop a belly that had nothing to do with fat; she was pregnant.

The young maid had a miscarriage and I thought a lot about all my miscarriages.

I’ve already talked about what comes next.

I say: I never wanted anything other than that. It’s how I was raised: what you have is what you have. What you have is always worse if you think there might be something else. I don’t make comparisons. Young people nowadays don’t understand that. My children didn’t understand it. When something is desired, it doesn’t happen.

What’s more: I’m an ultramontane Catholic, though I wouldn’t express it that way. This language has little to do with what I know, with what I am. I couldn’t express it that way because I don’t know any other way of being a Catholic.

But I can say this: I know God. God is with me. God is saving me a seat at his right hand.

And I can also say: most people haven’t preserved purity. I preserved my purity. My language has the literal meanings I was taught at home and in church. I don’t understand metaphor or anything abstract, except for God.

MOTHER: I spent a while doing research at the university in Seville. When my scholarship ended, my father said he couldn’t give me any money because my brothers wanted to study too, so I accepted a job in pediatrics. I always say that it’s more difficult to treat a child than an adult. Adults are able to describe their symptoms but a newborn baby can’t speak. A two-year-old can’t say much either. Sometimes four-year-olds don’t want to speak because they’re afraid of injections. That’s what children think when they come to my office: that I’m going to give them an injection. Some bring me drawings. I was promoted to departmental head and I set up two clinics. My father was to blame for the only problem I’ve had in my professional career: I was suspended for six months for giving him a prescription pad. Although my father was only a physician’s assistant, he did everything, including prescribing medication. He stitched wounds, extracted teeth, attended childbirths. Once somebody stopped me on the street and said, “Your father has worked wonders in this town.” I was proud. I was his favorite child. I still shed a tear when I remember the state he used to be in when he came home and we could all see that he was at the end of his tether. I always understood him. I don’t know if it’s that our terror prevented us from hating. I didn’t allow myself to be resentful, to refuse to understand, I mean. This thought isn’t mine; it could never have been. Does that make it any more false? Or true? Who can say? My father promised to cover the salary I lost during the six-month suspension he caused, but he never did. And I never asked for the money or reproached him, although, naturally, I haven’t forgotten that he didn’t pay me back a cent, or that we were all afraid of him, or that he made me specialize in pediatrics. I don’t know what use these memories are to me when I’ve already forgiven him. Why don’t we forget the things we pardon? I always say: all he ever knew was small-town life; he was the son of an alcoholic and a madwoman who used to wear a chastity belt, and he married a pious, almost illiterate woman who thought sex was disgusting.

DAUGHTER: By what authority can a language set itself before the things it names and, therefore, created? Back to the bearded man:

Words can also last.

They retain the emphasis
with which they were spoken,
the hours, days, months
of their gestation
like an affidavit
going nowhere,
separated from what they could
produce.

Dry throat now in
a dark corner of the dream,
the character that makes no sound.

Someone has greased it.

My grandmother made me feel the way I did when I was twelve and she caught me necking in the doorway. I never talked to my family about my partners, especially not her, but when I believed that my relationship with the bearded man was solid, I didn’t hide it from my mother. Then she told my grandmother, who called to hurl insults at me. I was a slut who’d lost her virginity. A great slut, a great whore. Why hadn’t I married Roberto? I wanted to laugh, to rant and rage, felt a mix of tenderness and hatred, and didn’t know what direction to take in a conversation in which an eighty-seven-year-old woman was scolding me with an unquestionable authority that reduced me in age and stature. What she was holding against me was a fantasy of her own making; Roberto was a teenage friend who, in my grandmother’s imagination, had come to occupy the place of my future husband. That fantasy—I would have deemed it risible if spoken by anyone else—made me feel like I was somehow soiled goods (I wasn’t a virgin!) and had betrayed her. My grandmother spoke as if I was backing out of a plan that the whole family had been setting its hopes on. Roberto had been nothing more than a good friend. But since his family got along well with mine and they owned a flourishing business, it could only end in marriage from my grandmother’s viewpoint. When she blurted out her fantasy, I felt like I was regressing to a time that had never existed, but that I was responsible for. That “Why didn’t you marry Roberto?” made me feel that an aspiration I never had was a great loss and led me, for a few moments, or perhaps for as long as my sense of guilt lasted, to understand the failure that not having married Roberto entailed. As all that was going on, the very idea still remained insanely comical. But there was something that I’d undoubtedly done very badly, something that was lost forever in my love life; now, no man could ever be Roberto, who I never loved.

MOTHER: I tried to give my daughter a connection to my native soil by leaving her at my parents’ home, but as she grew up in Valencia, she began to seem very different from our side of the family. She even changed her accent and only spoke like her grandmother when she was actually talking to her. With me, she used the strange, somehow foreign accent of the place I had never wanted to go to, but where I had a good life. I didn’t want to go, but when I was there, I never wanted to come back. Is everything in life like that?

DAUGHTER: My father has never forgotten the hotel he managed in Lloret de Mar. After they married, my mother forced him to leave that job and accompany her on her failed flight toward Extremadura: first to Ibiza, then Murcia, followed by Almería and Cordoba—where I was born—and later Palos de Moguer, in Huelva. Each time they moved, my father left his job and looked for another. When it finally seemed they were getting close, when the next step would be Badajoz, the cement company where he was working went out of business and he was offered a position managing a travel agency in Valencia. He accepted; he’d had enough of obeying his wife and taking jobs he didn’t enjoy, that only seemed good to her. My mother didn’t want to go with him at first; after six months of loud arguments, and the night she slapped my face and ended up with one of my milk teeth stuck in her palm, we moved to Valencia for good. During the drive there, my mother sang songs expressing her opposition and I backed her up; I was four years old, and it seemed like fun.

In Moguer, we’d lived in a large house with a swimming pool. I was unaware that we’d leave there, never to return, or that my mother and I had passed a strained, totally provisional August. My father had left before us, and the hallways were gradually filling up with boxes, where crickets sought shade between the cardboard and the bare white walls in the heat of the day. And each and every day, my mother would say, “We might not be here next week,” so the city of Valencia that I’d never visited became a home long before we lived there. I believed we’d take our home with us when we moved, as if it was possible to unpack an old house inside a new one. At night, my mother would make sandwiches in the dismantled kitchen and bring them out on a tray to the edge of the pool, where the water was much warmer than the terra-cotta tiles. After diving in, we’d hang onto the handrail to eat them and then lie out on the ground. From there, we could hear the vehicles passing on the highway and would guess if the brief but strong hum that jumped the garden wall belonged to a car, a truck, or a motorbike. That was the only August I wasn’t left with my grandmother.

MOTHER: My daughter was always asking me why I’d married her father when we were so different and I was constantly complaining about him. I often replied that I’d chosen him because he was a good man. That was another mandate that was passed down to me. My parents hadn’t known how to get along together and had suffered for it; so, I had to make amends. And anyhow, most of the men in my circle—doctors, like me—were arrogant.

GRANDMOTHER: They took everything from us. The farms went first. All our livestock went to feeding them. During those three years of war, there was no planting. The vegetable garden and fruit trees went to ruin. That’s what the people in town told us. My sister claimed they said it just to make us feel even worse. She said there were plenty of people who’d wanted to see us mending our clothes. They took everything from the house: tables, chairs, sideboards. As many as nine beds. Then they took the house from us. Our farmhands denounced my oldest brothers. My uncle took us in. For two years, my mother slept on a straw mattress on the floor with the younger children, and I was in a bed with a widowed cousin. We often went hungry. My father was in prison in Jaén. He didn’t come home to us when he got out; he had to go into hiding until the war ended. After that, we were able to return to the house and my father managed to recover the farms, but for years there were hardly any new clothes and our shoes had to last until our toes were sticking through the leather and we developed chilblains. Father stopped bringing my mother Chinese dress fabric from Barcelona when he went there to sell the livestock. He was always on the road. We’d hardly seen him during the war and afterward he started traveling again. He had such a hot temper, it put fear into the hearts of everyone around him. Time passed both quickly and slowly. I got engaged and then married. When my first child was a year old, my mother had a stroke. They put ice on her head. And there were bloodlettings: I remember the bowls and thinking they were doing the same to her as to the pigs. None of it was any use. She’d always been overweight and was fifty-six years old.

MOTHER: My mother and my poor brother with Down syndrome were the only ones not pained by my father’s behavior. Yes, Mother cried, but it didn’t really touch her. She only cried in the heat of the moment and then forgot all about it. She went on laughing because everything seemed amusing to her, especially my sister’s pranks. For my mother, all was well as long as what had to be done was done. Putting up with a husband she didn’t speak a word to was among the things that had to be done. It was part of her wifely duty. Or was she just hard-hearted? Did she never understand what she saw? Was what we thought good, bad for her and vice versa? She was an uncomplicated soul. The simplest person I’ve ever known. That was her saving grace. She used to let us go dancing at the social club. If she didn’t have visible proof of impurity, it never occured to her that we might leave the dance to kiss boys behind the church. Given her lack of imagination, we were able to do whatever we wanted. We were just like my father, who also did whatever he wanted. All of us took after him, except my brother with Down syndrome. It remained to be seen how we’d shock our families when we had them. Not by doing the same things as my father because we’d have been horrified to understand just how like him we were, how what we detested in him and had promised we’d never do was also true of us. But now we’re back again to what I’d never have said. I’d never have spoken about the inheritance. The words I use here aren’t mine, I can’t account for them, they concern someone who isn’t me. I’m beginning to wonder who is behind all this.

GRANDMOTHER: You all think nothing ever hurt me, but the thing is that you don’t acknowledge the existence of God. If you’re with God, you embrace everything. It used to break my heart to see you cry, but life goes on, and if you’re with God, you should have no fear. I wasn’t afraid of anything, except the gossip in town; here on Earth, whether a person is good or bad depends on gossip. When they bad-mouthed you, you started to feel bad. But if nobody said anything, you felt good inside yourself. There’s nothing inside that didn’t begin outside. The town gossip was like a judgement from God. God is far beyond this world and we are the ones who move toward him in a line: the line of life we transcend in death. I didn’t believe that your father’s behavior would stick in your memories because I’ve always moved toward God and I hoped you would do the same. That last thought isn’t mine; it had to do with my way of taking things lightly. And you were children. Children don’t know what’s going on. That’s what we used to think: nothing could harm them because they didn’t understand. It was like they had a veil over their eyes that was lifted at puberty. And that was why I was disappointed and became suspicious when my children became adolescents. They liked me less, even though I loved them just the same. But they weren’t protected by purity and they had to be held responsible. It was my duty. I was sent to a wet nurse. I lived apart from my mother until I was weaned at the age of two. I remember hardly anything besides the fun and games with my brothers, sisters, and mother. We were always laughing. My mother was always playing tricks. My father drank, but he was never the worse for it. He’d have long periods of ill humor when he didn’t get as much as he wanted for the livestock. He used to sell those Iberian pigs that feed on the local acorns to slaughterhouses in the north. The journey north was long; if it was hotter than usual, the animals would die of dehydration. My father traveled with the swine and every time the train stopped, he’d go to check the animals had enough water and that none of them had been crushed. He was always wishing he’d been born in the Basque Country, where it rained the whole year and he could have reared cows. I used to imagine the Basque Country to be like El Feriar, which is at a higher altitude than our valley; it was colder up there and it rained until June. When I was a child, before the war, we’d move to El Feriar for half the year, to a farmstead my father used to rent called Consolación. The swineherds came on foot with the animals, and the swine and sheep were able to roam the pastures. We children used to play in the ruins of the castle. We were freer to do things there. We used to bring a charcoal brazier to school with us. There was only one classroom, and the teacher taught me the same things as my older siblings. The boys worked in the fields with my father in the afternoons. All my mother did was make sure we ate the stale bread. We had maids to do the cleaning and cooking, while my mother spent her time sitting doing nothing or sitting chatting with them. She didn’t like having to move. She weighed over 200 pounds and was always thinking up funny stories. She had a wicked sense of humor. She used to tell us that our teeth would fall out from eating stale bread and that our father would pay dearly for being cheap. He made us eat stale bread but then he’d send us to have a gold tooth fitted whenever one fell out. He was a local landowner, but gave us an education in poverty. We hardly ever had new clothes and he never bought us toys. If we broke a bedstead, we’d have to sleep on the floor for months. My father thought this would teach us how to live a good life and so we’d work tirelessly. Hard work was the only thing that had any value for my father. If it had been up to him, my mother wouldn’t have had maids; but then, if my mother didn’t have maids, the townsfolk wouldn’t respect him. I think that if there had been no maids, we’d have been laughing the whole time, all of us sitting around my mother at the window, the room darkened so we couldn’t be seen by outsiders, by the passersby, the people my mother poked fun at. The maids kept our home in good order because that’s what my father demanded. They were the ones who kept track of how long we studied, made sure we said our prayers and washed behind our ears. It was the maids who took us to mass, pinched our arms if we said bad words, made us cry by telling us there was a man who’d come to kidnap us if we didn’t finish our meals, a man with three eyes whose footsteps we could hear in the hallway, always just about to open the door. We couldn’t go barefoot, play on the floor, or talk too much when the maids were there. We were supposed to look like we were in a permanent act of prayer. On the other hand, with my mother, we went around barefoot to feel the cool tiles under our feet; the room from where she kept an eye on the street smelled of rose water and sweet cakes; she’d sit my little brother on her lap and the rest of us would be on the arms of the chair or kneeling on the floor, our heads on her thighs, and every so often she’d rest her fingers on our hair, which was a treat. We never touched each other because we didn’t know how to softly stroke a beloved face. When we did get close, it was unconsciously, as if someone else was doing it. Those moments never meant what they meant. But what does the person who’s putting words in my mouth know about what affection was for us?

Come here so I can tie back your hair, my mother would say, and I’d feel her rough hands on the back of my neck and afterward I’d continue to sit by her, longing for her to tie back my hair again and to feel that pleasant tingling in the nape of my neck. And then I’d move my head to brush her arm. Or I’d ruffle my hair so she’d have to put the pins in properly again. I’d sometimes go to my sister and say I was going to undo one of her buttons. It was just so I could rest my fingertips on her chest and feel the lightness of her respiration, just like a bird’s, and her breath on my face. My mother’s hands were rough because they were so stiff. Because they didn’t know how to touch. Mine are rough from so much laundering but also from not knowing how to touch. When I’ve used up all my strength, when my legs are weak and I don’t have maids in a house that’s just as big as when we did have them and still couldn’t cope, I sit by the window in the dark, so the outsiders won’t see me, and I murmur things about them, the same funny things my mother used to say, with her exact same grace and disdain.

DAUGHTER: Can characteristics be transmitted up the line? Could my grandmother and mother have something of me in them?

MOTHER: I’m always going back to that memory of when I fainted right away during an eye operation one of the professors was carrying out on a corpse. It wasn’t a traumatic experience because I never wanted to be an ophthalmic surgeon. And I didn’t even feel embarrassed when I came around on a bench with my legs raised. Had my classmates seen my underwear? In the past, we were always thinking that sort of thing, and I believe we still do, but in a different way, a way that might be nothing more than hypocrisy.

DAUGHTER:

Let’s put it in here:

we give way to the temptation of observance
if a tomato is rotting on
the top shelf
we’ll point out the mold
the skin softened
by years of overabundance
rooting in the sun
the same aluminum as the fridge
where I left the flesh to dry out
to go claret-colored or sometimes black
as it happens I move my nose close;
an expression of emptiness on my face,
silence surrounds me
the house is alone

I’m unsure about my conclusions.

MOTHER: I couldn’t figure out why it was so hard for us to communicate with each other. But I’ll say it again: these aren’t my words, this isn’t my voice. I’d never have suggested there was a lack of communication in our home. I once read books about emotional intelligence. I’ve never been convinced that there’s any solution to psychological problems. While I was reading, I sometimes felt anxious. I identified with what the author was saying, but as soon as I closed the book, I’d be in the grip of a simple desire to move on. Things solve themselves or they don’t—that’s what I’ve always noticed in my home. My brothers used to wet the bed until they stopped. Are changes maybe just a matter of time? But I don’t mean to wander off topic. I repeat: I’d never have suggested there was no communication in my home. My mother chattered on the whole time, and there was a kind of chain reaction: I’d try to win my parents’ attention, my sister wanted my mother’s and mine, my brothers wanted my sister’s, and, through her, everybody’s. We were always dissatisfied with what we got. Only the little one, the boy with Down syndrome, had all our attention all the time, without even having to ask. My sister and I could babble on endlessly, kick up storms about things, and time moved on, while my younger brother was silent, introverted, and the one below him only spoke to his friends. My Down syndrome brother didn’t have much of a hold on language; he only had a few words but didn’t seem to mind. I’ll say it again: I’d never have suggested we didn’t communicate, even if whole hours passed without my father uttering a word or just mumbling something that was meant to be kind but sounded like a slap. The telephone set his nerves on edge; he’d grab it in both hands or sometimes just one, putting the other in the pocket of his pants, like he was afraid what it might do. His neck would swell a little, his cheeks go red. He’d not only demand total silence while he was on the phone, but also that nobody in the house move, and so my mother would have to warn the maids—they’d be in the storeroom or out in the chicken run maybe—to stand stock still, and if a wagon or a car passed outside at the moment my father was uttering the three or four crucial but banal words in the conversation, he’d bang his fist on the table and look at us as if we were responsible for the sound of the whistle or horn. Whenever he wanted to say something to us that couldn’t be expressed in yells, he’d pace up and down and around us, pretending he had something to do in the room, until he’d stop abruptly before one of us and rattle out what he’d been chewing over alone, generally some very short command that would resound through his whole body.

DAUGHTER: I’ve never worried about things being true to life. In fact, it seemed to me a duty to break with the absurd convention that, for example, a child should talk like a child. Don’t we know it’s fiction? Why try to make it look otherwise? I’d ask myself all these questions because at times I’d be awash with uncertainty and so, in spite of not seeing any need to think up devices for signaling that I wasn’t trying to be true to life, I’d end up inventing them.

One day, I told the bearded man that my father used to manage a travel agency and that I always remembered him in his office, engaged in one of those interminable conversations with a client, his eyes half-closed as he made some mental calculation, a cigarette between his lips. I’d be sliding back and forth on the slippery floor and I’d have to be quick about asking him for a hundred pesetas for a snack since there was always another client coming. I told the bearded man that my father specialized in vacations for seniors, and that meant we could stay in hotels at the invitation of the owners, in thanks for sending them guests or so he’d have a new place to recommend. They weren’t by any means luxurious; trips for fogies were cheap, but that didn’t necessarily mean the places were bad. The bearded man asked me if my father had always worked at that agency, and I said no, that he’d had a lot of different jobs before that, had done all sorts of things, although in his younger days he’d always worked the high season at hotels on the Costa Brava and had even been the manager of one: that was how he knew so much about the tourism industry. My mother worked in the public sector and we moved from city to city. I probably liked those changes because it was part of our family routine for years: continually moving, and then the regular trips when my father was head of the agency. During the decade before they let him go, we’d set out every Friday, sometimes on a long drive. We’d spend more time on the road than in the places we visited, and we never stayed two nights in the same hotel. The visits to those towns were brief: dinner, a stroll to a plaza, to a river, and along a few deserted streets, then it was back in the car. My parents could never agree on what sights to visit; the only thing that attracted them both was incessant movement. I’d always thought the sensation of heading to a place was the solution to something I couldn’t quite put my finger on when I was a child, but whose import stuck in my memory. After my mother’s death, my father and I started making those car journeys again on the flimsiest of pretexts. Were we searching for her? During those trips, I’d imagine my mother as a shadow forever ready to jump out at us from a ditch. I enjoyed that way of traveling; when I was small, what I liked most was the endless number of different ways of life that were unknown to me but that I could also conjure up during the few seconds they flashed past the window. Perhaps I was still submerged in my childhood, in that car. I saw myself once again inhabiting the glimmer of some nocturnal light that was instantly left behind, like a delicate firefly someone had thrown down in a rage and that shimmered for a moment before dying. I saw the dry gorges of the interior of the Levante, the isolated stillness of rustic farm toolsheds on the meseta, the limestone-colored houses strung along mountainsides where the cold would seep into the rooms at night along with tiny grasshoppers; I also saw the almost imperceptible advance through the pine trees of processionary moth caterpillars, whose poisonous hairs caused children like me to suffer blindness and hair loss. I didn’t tell the bearded man any of that. I mean, just how much can you share? How could I explain to him that I often “saw” all that superimposed on the present when the verb “see” didn’t even fit since it came as a single whole, not just an image but like a sensation or emotion, forming a place where things contained each other? How to tell him that I still experienced the fear of cities at dusk, a fear rooted in those same childhood years, in the backseat of that car from where, for some unknown reason, I imagined myself lost in a city as the light faded? As lost as lost could be. Not only would I vanish in a haze, but all those who knew me would assume I was gone forever without any possibility of sending news, of looking into the watchful, compassionate eyes of a police officer and saying, “Please call my family and tell them I’m alive.” The moment I found myself at the heart of those streets, they would become labyrinthine and there would be no way of following the thread of the space and time in which I existed. During all the years of my childhood, that terror, that primordial fear, slept somewhere in the car, very close to my legs, and it would stroke them when the evening light started to blur outlines. I have a vivid memory of how everything became denser, possibly because that fear of mine was merging with my mother’s, who’d also be there at the end of the day along with the vexation. What had been enlightening and pleasurable became something dark and viscous. I’d sit still, silent; if I protested, an unstoppable force would hurl me out of the world. I had no choice but to bear my fear until the next day, when the bright air entered through the window, along with joy and a sense of being free of care, and everything started all over again.

GRANDMOTHER: Cheesemaking. That’s what my sister and I took up when our father demanded that we do something around El Feriar. When we strained the milk, the house reeked of sheep—the odor was so strong it stuck in my nose for days, even after we’d opened all the windows and the cheeses were upstairs in the storeroom. Then we added rennet. After we’d removed the whey came the part I liked best: putting the curds into the cincho basket molds. Not that I liked doing it by myself; what I enjoyed was the way my sister and I moved together in the kitchen, squeezing the cheese between our hands. It used to make me roar with laughter, and my sister too, but it also gave us the sense that we were doing something very important. While the cheeses were resting, I’d often go up to the storeroom to look at them and would feel that something was happening there. I missed the time we spent together in the kitchen, but what made me go back to look at the covered cheeses was their mystery, what was slowly being transformed inside them, which would surely affect us all. They were like hearts beating silently. Their stillness made me impatient. I’d be more likely simply to say, “We made cheese. What fun!” or “Those cheeses were delicious.” We used to eat them with quince paste. I don’t like cooking. In all my life, the only things I’ve enjoyed making have been those cheeses. They aged better in El Feriar because of the humidity. We stopped going there when war broke out. In the early days, the war was like a joke. That was before my father was taken prisoner, before everything in the house was looted, before what happened to my brothers. I was born in 1922. I was fourteen in ’36 and I liked watching the soldiers passing by; they used to make saucy comments to my sister and me when we were on our way to the cistern for water. My sister was already thinking about becoming a nun, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying a saucy comment. A month passed before anything much happened in our town. A lot of the soldiers were local boys that we knew. They started recruiting at eighteen. My two older brothers were at El Feriar, managing the farm. By the time my father decided they should come back, the road was already unsafe because of the ambushes; places would be in the hands of one band in the morning and the other by nightfall.

MOTHER: When they heard his hearing aid whistling, people would say, “Here comes Bartolomé Grande,” as they called him. Everyone could hear the device whistling, except for him. He was my mother’s father. From him, I learned about courage, although I was never courageous myself. But I recognized that whenever I gained momentum, the drive came from him. I’ve been frightened most of my life, but I’ve occasionally experienced power: the opposite of fear. There have been times when my fear has evaporated with the ease of a breath of wind carrying away the hint of a cloud. Is there any other way to scare off fear than by not resisting it? In those instants of omnipotence—an omnipotence that can be felt throughout the whole body, but particularly the arms, as though the mere act of extending them supposes an easy, glorious conquest—in those instants when I experienced courage, I always thought of him. My grandfather was never surprised that when he rounded a corner, everyone was already waiting for him. He’d grown accustomed to being expected and to doors being open. He can’t have been able to remember what it was like to surprise someone. I sometimes think his hearing aid was a means of maintaining his former position in society. In the final three decades of his life, his house aged; the furniture was eaten by woodworm, and everything smelled like the stable, even though there was only one mule left. His toilet was still a hole through which the shit fell into a chicken run. But in the old days, lace curtains would be discreetly drawn back when he passed and nobody would have had the nerve to snub him. People came outdoors on any pretext whenever he appeared in the square and followed just to look at him. There were no celebrity gossip magazines or televisions, so you went to see the great stars in the flesh. How grand something so small seemed. The poor were so poor they thought anyone who had anything was rich. I’ve seen it in my own lifetime; the only similarity between the very rich and the very poor is that they’ve lost all sense of proportion. When I started working as a pediatrician, I used to visit Romani families who lived in makeshift shacks with tin roofs. In summer, the roofs got so hot that the whole family would have to go outside and spend the day in the shade of a tree or under a bridge. I’m talking about Seville in August. I used to go with my medical bag containing a thermometer, a stethoscope, a blood-pressure monitor, and wooden tongue depressors. The Romani mothers had the craziest ideas about me, like that I lived in a palace and could buy as many cars as I wanted. They seemed to think that once you started to possess things, you could own everything. For them, having and not having was a sort of natural quality or talent. And a talent is innate, you can’t lose it. Lack of money is not unlike hunger. When there’s food, the starving person wolfs it down so fast it makes him ill. After the war, everyone put on weight. Many ate till they burst and suffered what was then called congestion. The body couldn’t cope. It was impossible to convince people that being fat wasn’t healthy. My father, who, as I said, studied medicine, tried to explain it to them, but the voice of a specialist could do nothing against deep-seated beliefs born of need and suffering. For years, being in good health was synonymous with having gotten things out of proportion. I believe in having things in proportion. I also believe that things are relative. Those two ideas aren’t incompatible. This language is getting too distant from mine again. The point is that things being relative used to make people leave their homes to watch my grandfather go by, like he was a king, when in fact what he had was only considered a fortune because no one else had anything. It wasn’t really a large fortune and my grandfather wasn’t some great landowner. When his properties were divided among his offspring, the splendor melted away.

DAUGHTER: Here’s another bad poem:

When you left, I knew

I had to eat up
what was left of you:

nails
a half-smoked cigar in the ashtray
bits of your beard in the corner of the shower
a languishing desire under the couch
and hopes condensed
in blue glow rocks
that shone in the dark,
hopes that I had to kill with my own hands
to then hang out in the open air
like huge dead chickens
until they were perfectly cooked.

The bearded man again. I never write poetry. That’s why I find it strange that all I can do is open my black notebook and vomit, puke out what I call poems just to give them a name. It’s probably self-indulgence.

MOTHER: My youngest brother was always tagging along behind my sister. He used to fetch the birds she killed with her catapult and help her fill cooking pots with dirt. He firmly believed that my sister would realize just how much he did for her and would give him more tasks. “Done,” he’d say. My sister ignored him, and it was only when he became a pest that she’d send him to fill another cooking pot just to shut him up. She never did anything with the piles of earth dumped in the middle of the yard, with my brother waiting for a word of thanks or some other form of recognition. It was pitiful to see him there by the dirt no one was going to use to make a castle or mud pies; that soil was from the flower beds, and the sight of it would have my mother in fits when she came outdoors. I sometimes thought my sister didn’t give him the task of fetching panfuls of soil to keep him quiet; it was to humiliate him.

GRANDMOTHER: Even though I had my fears about the maids, I chatted with them all the time. The conversations went like this: My cousin Pastora has slaughtered five hogs and now she can’t find space for them all in the storeroom. Josefina’s son has been sent to the seminary. Someone brought cream yesterday. Cosario managed to get me six pounds of sugar. Rosa’s middle child has tuberculosis. Didn’t another of her boys die of that? Yes, and they burned the mattresses and cleaned his bedroom with lye, but the other boy ended up catching it.

DAUGHTER: Puke: that’s the verb used to refer to something written in an emotional state that doesn’t make for good literature. You have to steer clear of puke. If I say what I’m writing is a poem, I’m imposing a limit on myself. My puke poems, along with the darkened rooms of the house, are the origin of what I’m writing now, at the root of the voices of my mother and grandmother. They are both inside me, they are me because they made me. And what’s more, they are dead. Their lives can merge with mine. That’s what I thought at first. But then something weird happened while I was writing: I had the constant impression that ghosts aren’t only inside you. They are outside too. They live on in the world.

I keep finding tokens of you
everywhere
they are luminous signs that at night
turn into eyes shining in the darkness
or deer glimpsed on the roadside
after a barking noise in the ditch
hidden among the trees
dead (meat) moving through the leaves
silent processionary moths
the ululation of your cold breath
death throes in the night.

This is the second poem I wrote to the bearded man. I know it’s bad, I won’t harp on about it. The poem begins with him and ends with the death of a relationship, not a person, but while I was writing, it was my mother’s death that was on my mind, the thirty-six hours it took her to die, her threadlike breath, so fragile, so tireless.

My mother had herself admitted to hospital in the evening, aware that she wouldn’t be coming back home, committed to the ritual of putting on and taking off the white gloves she’d needed since the chemo had caused increased sensitivity. Just touching something was painful for her. The slightest brush of the bedspread was like using a scouring pad on the exposed nerve of a tooth. Eventually, as her brain switched off due to the effects of the injection that would end her life, there was only the automatic action of the glove, unconnected to anything, even the pain; that movement my mother repeated during her last months had become something fundamental: putting on and taking off the white cotton gloves. She was like a magician about to put her hand into a top hat. When she was already wearing the gloves, she’d want someone to put them on and then they had to be taken off so she could put them on again. It calmed her. She was possibly unaware of anything besides the fabric slipping over her fingers and palms. It may have been the only expression of fear she was capable of showing. My mother was full of fears, but when wearing the gloves she felt protected.

The bearded man moved into the center of my life when we scarcely knew each other. He left his wife and was halfheartedly looking for a room where he didn’t expect to spend longer than a month, until, he told me, he could find a cheap place, big enough for his children to spend weekends with him. But he didn’t move out. He stayed in my apartment and we began the sort of relationship that’s destined for failure because each person sees only their own desires reflected in the other. It was a relationship in which death was always present, possibly because I knew my mother was fading and that experience led me to create fitting metaphors.

Before he left, he took me to San Andrés de Teixido, where, legend has it, those who haven’t made a pilgrimage go after death. We drove through a petrified forest. The day was cloudy with patches of fog from time to time, and as we progressed along the backroads the silence devoured us and was like the rocks in that landscape: it demanded our whole attention, every ounce of our intelligence, our strength. It’s not that we felt uncomfortable; we were overwhelmed. When we reached the village, the eyes of the cows grazing on the gently sloping cliffs seemed almost human, and the same was true of the dogs wagging their tails as we passed, used to seeing pilgrims. The bearded man was from Galicia and told me—perhaps inaccurately—the legends: the dead, he said, came there in the form of animals, and Santa Compaña would take the wandering souls recruited in the surrounding parishes to the sanctuary. The iconography of the altarpiece in the sanctuary was strangely delirious: the saints were too small, like garden gnomes; the faces of the angels at the bases of niches looked diabolical, and there were martyrs whose foreshortened bodies brought to mind tortured dolls. On one wall hung a child-size coffin, and beside the altar were gloomy wax ex-votos of arms and legs, brought by the sick and their families. The bearded man and I were neither believers nor atheists. We sat on one of the pews; the earth drew us downward, as if the sanctuary was going to submerge itself in the cliffs. Apparently, there was no mystery in that energy. He told me that beneath the sanctuary there was a spring that exercised a force toward the depths. As we walked around the beautiful old cemetery, we pretended to be dead people and took photos looking like we’d just escaped from a grave. Then we followed a path running along the edge of the cliff until the cold air and the cows made the bearded man edgy. Those gazes didn’t only look human to him now; he had the impression that his father might be watching him from behind those calm, bovine eyes: his father, who had died when he was eleven, was a wandering soul on the mountainside. He turned back; our socks were already damp. Slowly, in silence, as if we were in a procession, we returned to the village and went to a bar; something somber was hovering over the bearded man, he’d become a creature of the night. Black coat, black beard, muddy boots, the bar almost in darkness because the owner made do with the light from a small window with a view of the immense Atlantic. How do you feel when you’re looking out over the ocean? Are you coming from over there or leaving here? The bearded man told me that he felt he was coming, and I told him I was leaving, going toward that vague sea-deep line. Coming and going was comforting. Going to death. Coming from death. It’s no coincidence that my poems led me to my dying mother, to her voice and my grandmother’s, in order to finally speak of my life with him. This is the first one.

All the women in my
family
have come to call you a liar.

Mother, Grandmother
enigmatic statues in old photos.

Today, I’m a child
who has been ditched
against the will of words.

So many lies, says my grandmother.

The chorus nods
it doesn’t dare to speak because we
distrust language.

Speak in the name of that bearded man.

Mother, Grandmother, long shadows,
you want me to quietly breathe in
the miasmas of the unused carpet
but when my grandmother repeats, so many
lies,
those are also words
and a circle we do not now want
is completed.

GRANDMOTHER: Winter days used to be darker. It rained most of the time and when it wasn’t raining, there was frost and ice, and the pipes froze. I used to bring the flowers into the living room before going to bed so the cold wouldn’t kill them, and in the morning I took them out again, still in my nightgown.

Our houses weren’t built for cold weather; they were designed for the heat of summer siestas and so the food wouldn’t go bad, not even what was kept in the storeroom. Ours was a wedding present from my father; I think I’ve already said that. He also offered to pay for my husband to finish his medical studies, but he didn’t want to be indebted to anyone. So, although my father would have preferred my husband to be a qualified doctor, he remained a physician’s assistant. He started off with high hopes and ended with very little, not that it made any difference to me what he was. My life would have been just the same, everything in the exact same order, the very same flight of a fly over an oilskin tablecloth on July 16, 1961, at twenty past three in the afternoon. I don’t know why he married me. I guess it was because I was a landowner’s daughter. Why did I marry him? When God has a reason to send us problems, they are actually solutions. But, truly, I don’t know why I married my husband. He was handsome and was going to be a doctor. That’s the beginning and end of it. There was no need for me to know anything more, and even if I suspected I did, it was in a not knowing way of knowing. Anxiety gave me an inkling that I needed to know something more. I had the feeling I was putting my foot in a pond of murky water, full of grubs and moss. Only in the mornings, when I’d get up while the house was still silent and the yard was reflecting the blue of the clear sky, was the peace unbroken. You could swim amid the moss with the larvae. Later, that dirty but welcoming pond turned to mud. It was a great effort to wade through it. And I’m still sure it was a solution. Though it doesn’t look like one. God has his reasons for sending blindness.

MOTHER: I couldn’t say where my vocation comes from. I don’t even call it that most of the time because it would be a lie. It wasn’t a vocation. I don’t know what it was. I could explain it this way, but it might not be true: when I was in school, I liked the arts subjects more than the sciences. But literature wasn’t considered important in my family. My father’s father had been a veterinarian and my father was a pseudo-doctor; it was expected that one of the children would have a career in the healing professions, making accurate incisions and infallible diagnoses. A career that wouldn’t fizzle out, as happened to the veterinarian accused of being homosexual at his university and the future doctor who ended up as a physician’s assistant. My paternal grandfather had been so scared of gossip that he rotted in that backwater from the age of twenty-seven until he died at fifty-three, delivering calves and treating horses with parasitic bot flies. People paid him whatever way they could. If he was treating the animals of my maternal grandfather, the landowner, there’d be money. The same was true of my father: many of the people who came to his consulting room—the first door after the entrance hall—could only pay with golden thistles stripped of their prickles, or grass peas. Some women would bring curly endives, carob seeds, or beetroot leaves when he treated them, their husbands, and children. It was my father’s suggestion. “What can you pay me with?” he’d ask. He never refused to treat anyone. We were never short of anything, even if there wasn’t much to spare. If it had been up to my mother, only the boys would have gone to college, we women were only good for running the house and praying, but my father paid for my sister’s and my education, and was a caring parent. He’d bring us chestnuts, bread pudding, and sweet grits. We used to eat beet sugar. The nearest thing we had to candy was lettuce stumps that he’d cut in circles to amuse our childish mouths. My mother used to bake huge cookies, rather plain because she sometimes couldn’t get all the ingredients. They had to be dunked because they were dry, or that might not be the right word, maybe they were a bit tasteless. Those cookies were devoured religiously—The Body of Christ, Amen—especially by my mother, who received the Body of Christ every day and would have liked to live off that excuse for sugar. We also had pig-fat tortas. My father used to say that lard was bad for our health. When we were threatening one another, we’d say, “Are you looking for a torta?” My mother was always threatening, “I’ll fry you up hot as a torta,” but it never got beyond a slap of her rough hand that felt like a prickle on your face. If any of us blasphemed, she’d wash their tongue with a laundry brush and soap until it was red raw. All that sounds like a metaphor now, as if such things never happened. But in the past, we took language literally. We read the Bible literally. There was the Final Judgement, and we were going to ascend to heaven to see the throne that emitted lightning, peals of thunder, and voices, with four living creatures around it covered in eyes front and back. All those images of the power of the Holy Spirit that were meant to enlighten us became a horror movie. Literality is terrifying. Literality destroyed metaphor because we gobbled up everything just as it came, without understanding any of it. Language was more literal when it came from an authoritative source: if my mother, father, or the priest said it; if the teacher said it. Only when we were playing or when my mother sat at the window after my father had gone out to visit the sick could words relax and breathe. It wasn’t ignorance that led us to be literal; we were scared stiff.

But what I’m getting at here is that I had a legacy, not a vocation. I never knew how to avoid it. My paternal grandfather was a failed veterinarian, my father was a failed doctor, and my career had to correct those errors. I was under orders not to fail. That was my grandfather’s command, the desire he handed down to my father and then to me. What did the failure consist of? I mean, just how much would I have to achieve not to be considered a failure?

DAUGHTER: My mother was the love of my life. During her last months, her existence seemed almost uncanny. Dispossessed of everyday problems and the future ones she wasn’t going to have—all of which she’d been sickeningly obsessive about—she was a fragile thread, frayed to breaking point. As she grew weaker, an eerie calm took hold of her. All her energy was focused on essentials; she’d lost so much weight that there began to be something so elemental about her body that it was sacred. Whatever it is that life depends on was suddenly visible in her and her small universe: walking along the hallway, eating, breathing; all carried out with an effort. There was nobility and an absolute mystery in that minute, humble universe, and she ate, breathed, and walked with that nobility, demonstrating that existence is made up of so few things, it seems a miracle.

As a grown woman, I used to spend the summers at my grandmother’s house, until she got dementia. The last time I was with her there, she ordered me to sleep in the bedroom we called the Sacred Heart because it was next to a small altar with a statue of Jesus pointing to his heart. It had once been the maids’ room. Previously, my bedroom had been upstairs, where there were geckos that went out at night to hunt insects by the streetlamp; they got out through gaps in the balcony window, which didn’t close properly. The ceiling would be crawling with those reptiles and I was always afraid one of them would fall on me. By the time my grandmother made me sleep downstairs in the Sacred Heart bedroom that had once been the maids’ room, there was only junk in the upper part of the house. I woke one night with the sensation that my grandfather or great-grandfather was panting by my bed. I could even feel the mattress moving up and down. My grandfather had been dead for years when I had that dream. I often used to prowl around his office. When I looked in the glass cabinet where he’d kept medicines, I found a packet of Viagra. Had my ultra-Catholic grandmother—who couldn’t even bear to talk about sex and for whom any woman not a nun was a slut—had to tolerate the onslaughts of Viagra?

My grandmother sent me to that room next to the statue of the Sacred Heart and I knew it was a prelude to not wanting me in the house. Years before, she’d become depressed when Felipe—her Down syndrome son—died; she’d recovered, but afterward wasn’t interested in relationships with the living. She hated me turning on lights at night and would sometimes get out of bed in the dark to scold me. I resigned myself to getting undressed with a flashlight. After that, my visits were reduced to three annual meals. The maids’ room was like my grandfather’s medicine cabinet: there was no key, it was open. The door didn’t fit properly, and the glass panels allowed light to spill out into the hallway. It was more like sleeping in some transit point than in the bedroom of a house, as if a small hole had been made for me in a corner of the hallway. Had the maids also had the feeling that they didn’t enjoy the same protection as the rest of household when they slept, that they were one more object belonging to the owners? Were they like the medicines in my grandfather’s cabinet? Could you take a maid or an aspirin? Or was there open warfare between the maids and my grandmother and this apology for a bedroom was her revenge, her warning that every move they made was observed and judged? The maids could have slept in the storeroom; it was cold, dirty, even less hospitable, but at least they would have enjoyed their inhospitable, dirty privacy—they could have come and gone as they pleased and talked together. They had, nevertheless, been assigned a room where they had to be quiet, not move, and live with the threat of someone opening the door on a whim. When I arrived in the house, at the age of six months, to be left in my grandmother’s care, there were no maids, just a woman who came in once a week to help with the laundry. They didn’t have a washing machine, so it was an arduous task for one person alone. That woman’s name was Sixta, and she used to take out her dentures before she got to work because she was incapable of scrubbing the garments with her mouth closed: the rocking motion made the dentures fall into the water. When I was eight or nine, my grandmother bought a washing machine and, after that, Sixta only came to visit. She gradually shrank until her features became almost indistinguishable and her body scrawny, as dry as a straw shoe. She was around the same age as my grandmother but died before her. Nobody was going to do away with my grandmother. We used to tell her that she’d outlive us all, and, somehow, we liked that idea, and she was flattered. She’d smile in a way that would make you think she was sitting atop an enormous vault that only she had the key to. She was the custodian of our final resting place, as if it was her only means of keeping the clan together.

GRANDMOTHER: My eldest son used to sleep like a corpse, hands crossed on his chest. He’d get out of bed at night and go to the yard; there would be a noise because he had to open several doors, and I’ve always had sharp hearing. That gave me time to catch up with him and stop him from going out into the street in his long johns, his eyes half open but seeing nothing, like he was looking inside himself or—and this used to scare me—he was observing something the rest of us couldn’t see. I’d had dead children that came out in the toilet when I was two or three months on. It seemed like my eldest boy was one more of those children, dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. My eldest daughter used to come with me when my son was sleepwalking. She’d stay with me, and I know that if I hadn’t been there, she’d have put her two hands on his shoulders to guide him gently back to bed. It was like she also understood how important it was not to wake my son and abruptly mix the worlds of the living and the dead. Did my murdered brothers live inside him? Did they raise their hands to point to the bullets in his body? Did they fall to the ground every so often inside my son? Did they try to escape?

DAUGHTER: The X-ray machine was installed in my mother’s office when she decided to go into private practice. She worked at a clinic in the mornings and saw patients at home in the afternoons. It was all the rage for doctors to have X-ray machines back then and so she bought one. In those days, people didn’t always think things through, or maybe it was just my mother who didn’t think everything through. I’m pretty sure she didn’t take any precautions when using the machine, and I used to play with it. I’d stand on the small platform, press the button to turn on the rays and put a hand on the panel to see my bones. How much radiation built up in my body from spending hours and hours looking at my skeleton? I also used to invite my best friend at that time to stand on the platform; she was a thirteen-year-old neighbor whose father was a truck driver and she used to sleep anywhere she could find a space in their apartment because, with so many others around, she was forgotten. My friend and I would get up on the machine, turn it on, and look at our ribs and skulls. We’d laugh and make faces but our skulls never showed any expression, as if there was no one inside us, as if we were a simple device that someone switched on because they had nothing better to do. Our skulls didn’t frighten us.

It was very dark in that room. Dark during the day and at night, and the window was only ever open if my mother was in there. The shadows were more intriguing than the light, and when I pushed the door open, I’d have the impression that the space had mushroomed, that there wasn’t only a table, a bed, the X-ray machine, and a pair of flowered curtains, but several rooms, all of them inhabited. Why is it that as children we’re never alone and there’s always someone under the bed or breathing in our ear?

When my mother gave up her private practice to transfer to Valencia, the machine came with us and for years stood in a nook between my father’s bathroom and the kitchen; I guess it was there in case my mother decided to have private patients again, or maybe it was just because it had been an investment and she hated to throw it out. Was it dangerous to have it in the house? Did it emit radiation when it was switched off? I don’t know. I could check on the internet. Given my hypochondria, I felt that the X-ray machine had preceded me, felt like I’d been born from a contaminated device and was a small monster that needed just a few more mutations to be completely horrific. My partners have also formed radioactive strata. As was the bearded man:

Once gone,

I take the bed out onto the balcony
to air
the fabric of doubt.

There are words ahead
making love in seven seconds,
they’re rehearsing for a show
where boards are
broken,
soiled sheets pile up
until someone offers
their flesh as a sacrifice
to be devoured by us, the spectators.

The bed still on the balcony.

Winters pressed together
on the walls
spring arrived without us knowing
what to do.

Silences
in noisy bars
where not so long ago we’d
reached that tepid
but critical temperature.

Bottles of beer
the Circuit de Monaco:

we’d confused them with love.

I surely have preconceived ideas,

Plato would be proud of me.

GRANDMOTHER: Every day, I rode eighteen miles on a donkey, along roads filled with soldiers, to take food to my father in the prison. They all knew who I was and respected me. During the first weeks, before he was imprisoned, people said war the way you’d say fiesta, everything topsy turvy like upside-down cakes, or on the pilgrimage to San Isidro, or the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We were aware something was going to happen and were hoping it would be enjoyable: a dance, trays of flaky hojaladres with honey, a band, puppets, a saint in a flower-filled niche. Who would we meet? To what strange music would we go to sleep at night? How late would my sister and I be allowed to run between the wagons in the pilgrimage procession? How many palm fronds would be laid on the ground? Might there even be a whole pile of fronds for us to jump around on? Might all our parents get distracted and forget to extinguish the oil lamps in the houses? Couldn’t we expect anything and everything and that it would all be marvelous? Ten days went by without anybody being killed, all of us pretending to feel compassion when we heard news of the executions in surrounding towns. The maids said our land would be confiscated and it was odd to hear them say that because we couldn’t tell how they felt about it—if they were happy or sad, if they hated or loved me, if they were mocking me or were as disoriented as I was, because one minute it was one thing and the next another, and one day we all behaved with each other this way and the next that, and it wasn’t in our words because when it came to speaking we didn’t say much, except that nobody wanted anything bad to happen to anyone else. The maids didn’t speak, the men who went to the fields didn’t speak, my mother, my sister, my teacher: none of them spoke. Their mouths didn’t speak, but their bodies did. Ribs and hearts and hair were first full of valor and then full of fear. We’d never before felt so many different things about each other in such a short period of time, depending on whether we thought we were going to be the winners or losers. We still hadn’t heard anything from my brothers; none of us could have imagined what was going to happen to them. The same men whom my father had sometimes employed in the fields came, looking all dirty, with shotguns on their shoulders and holding their caps to their chests in a mark of respect, like they’d always done, and said to my mother, “Excuse me, Señora, but we have to search the house.” First, they took our money and anything of value that could be sold or whatever: things like my mother’s jewelry. When they carried off her jewelry, that caused real distress and war meant something dark, as it did when my father was taken prisoner. Over the weeks that followed, they took the chickens, the cheeses, the honey, the hams, all the meat from the slaughter, plus blankets and embroidered quilts, and Manila shawls, and stockings, dresses, and pants, leaving us with one change of clothes apiece. The whole family was together, except for my father, who was in prison in the next town, and my two brothers, who had stayed on to work at El Feriar, but we had no news of them.

DAUGHTER: Back to the poems about the bearded man:

The frogs in the pond nibble me,
they get in my pockets.

Two calls from you and I’m waiting for
a third.

But there’s a trick to strapping on the saddlebag
and a dog chases me.

I’m scared of it
scared because it’s so nice.

Saddlebag isn’t a word I’d use. But I’m not a biker. When I say that I think of the old-style ones they used to put on the backs of animals. Is saddlebag a word bikers tend to say? The term was still used in my earliest childhood, but it has nothing to do with the bearded man, an urbanite who wore a suit sometimes, when politicians or judges invited him to a restaurant. They’d spend five or six hundred euros on each meal. Did that come out of public funds? The people at the top have to feel that’s where they are, the bearded man told me, and it wasn’t an accusation, simply the recognition of a fact of life, like saying brown-haired people must see brown hair when they look at themselves in the mirror. During the time he lived in my apartment, the bearded man ironed his own suits and shirts. I never iron anything; I’d prefer to go around in creased clothes before getting the iron out, so the sight of the bearded man in my living room with the old iron my mother had given me—an iron I’d never used—seemed somehow exotic. The bearded man called those politicians and judges his “sources.” “I had an appointment with one of my sources today,” he’d say. Those sources would sometimes call him very early in the morning with new secrets to tarnish the reputation of someone in an opposition party, or their own. We’d be woken by a minister, a spokesperson, an advisor. The bearded man garnered information that was never broadcast on the radio or printed in any newspaper: information about, for instance, certain sexual proclivities. They weren’t unusual or pathological practices, but there was something dumb about the way those important individuals in the government divulged them to their friends. The smear was irrelevant to their responsibilities, but could end their political careers. Today, I know things about former ministers and spokespeople I’ve never told anyone, even though they are juicy snippets of gossip, and I ask myself who I’m being loyal to.

GRANDMOTHER: I had more miscarriages than children. I’d go to the toilet and suddenly there’d be blood and clots that were like pieces of a baby. I wouldn’t want to look in case I saw a hand. Or even worse, an eye. An eye looking at me, scrutinizing my thighs, my supple, white flesh, my face looking into the toilet bowl, my eyes meeting an eye that was reproaching me for expelling it from my insides. I once saw a child’s mouth and ran away before those lips could move and say something to me. It was the old-fashioned kind of privy with no cistern that you had to flush with buckets of water, but I didn’t pour anything in that time. I had to stay in bed for thirty-six hours in case the miscarriage stopped, in case the heart of the thing decided to stay there inside and, like a lizard’s tail, wriggle around until another being sprouted; that miscarriage no longer took the form of blood, although that continued to flow from my belly, but ghosts that arrived and floated around the room, ghosts that went through the whole house looking for bodies to inhabit and since I wouldn’t let them near me, they had to go somewhere else, and they were smooth and chilled the air. They say that if you notice the cold in a place, that means it has a lot of ghosts. Our house was gradually freezing. It was like winter never went away, but accumulated on the walls, and then came another winter and added to the accumulation. Were they winters or dead children? You could hear the wails. And on the top floor, where nobody slept, you could also hear footsteps at night. Short, irregular steps, like a child that doesn’t know where it’s going. There were maids late at night: they spread the cold, and their unborn children—now swarming through the house, making the furniture creak—exhaled air so their life breath crossed the forbidden passages. After seven consecutive miscarriages, I had my half-witted boy; it was what they call Down syndrome these days. He was the best behaved and happiest, and for me the smartest; my heart almost froze when he died so early. But for the sake of God, I pulled through.

DAUGHTER: The bearded man and I always took the long way around. And that mania for leaving the highway and traveling through the maze of narrow, potholed backroads wasn’t only driven by a desire to explore the countryside or find villages whose names didn’t even appear on signs—we were looking for something that had to do with death. As they fanned out on hillsides, the graveyards of those villages displayed straggly, white, sunlit interiors that were modestly beautiful in their insignificance, their cleanliness, and plastic flowers. Walking through them, it was hard for us to believe that there was no such thing as eternal life. Or perhaps it was that the idea of vanishing from the world wasn’t so terrifying there; we perhaps accepted it due to the simple beauty of the whitewashed walls, the black and white photos on gravestones, and the cypresses surrounded by flowerbeds with handsome rose bushes. Who could ask for more?

GRANDMOTHER: I think I’ve already said that my father was imprisoned for almost the whole of the war, first in a nearby town and then in Jaen, where he came close to facing a firing squad. We didn’t tell him about my brothers until peace was declared because we were afraid the news would make him ill. When he came back to us on a train, my mother embraced him and whispered in his ear that two of his sons had been killed. My father went deaf in that ear.

DAUGHTER: There’s no such thing as causes that lead to a single effect; what happens is an infinite repetition of structures that has to be halted. So it’s a matter of not repeating. Is narrating things repetition?

If the walls speak against me

I don’t want to know.

The hours when I wanted your death,
wouldn’t suffice
to cross the frontier
before confusion finished us off.

Who are you? Who am I?

From which direction is the wind blowing?

How much resentment before sutures are needed?

Abandonment is redundant,
it consists of banging our heads
against the same rock
until we’re sure of the strength of the impact.

MOTHER: Everything that has a decisive effect on us acts like an impregnation: we can’t separate the material we’re made of from the event, and that event isn’t something that simply becomes attached to us; it transforms us. Like when I fainted during the eye operation, for example.

DAUGHTER: I’ve always imagined the scene at night, and I could even swear that I was sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table when she told me about it, but I’m not certain I haven’t mixed some midday when she referred to an event in the past with a story of my own invention, or one heard from other members of the family. And what did she tell me? Almost nothing. There was no point in asking questions; you had to let her talk and then maybe some crumb of information would fall from her lips. If you asked questions, she’d become wary and accuse you of prying. What was she hiding? What did she feel she was being accused of? Could she have been protecting me? For a long time, this was how I composed it in my head:

A September night, 1936. Two brothers, sixteen and seventeen. The elder, Sebastián, was trying to decide if they should go into hiding as he knew they might be killed. The younger, Roque, had no opinion about whether it would be best to leave or stay. That decision had to be made by his elder. Roque felt only a ferocious fear in his legs and was kicking the ground and the rocks, like he wanted to stab them, like the ground and the rocks were him and his brother. He and his brother, he thought, were their own worst enemies and it made no difference what they decided. They were the sons of the landowner. Just thinking of it sickened him. He had no appetite and drank to stop feeling dizzy. He was left-handed; they used to cane him for that at his private school. Now he wished he’d never left there. He was a good student; his brother was the dunce. He wanted to tell Sebastián that they should have stayed at the boarding school, that his body was telling him there was no decision to be made. But he didn’t fully trust that intuition. In the mornings, they let the sheep out to graze and took the animals to the pond for water. His brother’s job was to look after the pigs while he fed the orphaned yearling lambs, which would soon be slaughtered. Their meat had a different flavor. He liked letting the baby lambs come up close and take turns licking his fingers. But he hadn’t fed them that morning because he was so upset. He wished he had: the yearlings bleated until he had to tell the overseer’s wife to take them milk. He hadn’t come in for lunch and before his siesta, his brother asked if he was sick with something. I’m not ill, he’d said, and continued pacing up and down the pasture, stopping to cool off at the watering holes, but the heat had put a halt to everything. That scared him. He had the impression that the livestock was going to die. Then he thought it wasn’t really all that hot; the problem was rooted in his body and the sensation that had been plaguing him since morning. They’re going to kill us, he told Sebastián when he opened his eyes. Sebastián was sitting in a rocker, the back of his hand brushing a shotgun propped against the wall. They’d never been without a weapon since July 18, when war broke out. And they’d never used them less. They were too frightened to shoot hares and turtledoves. The shots they could hear in the distance weren’t from hunters now. Sebastián thought there was no point in trying to rid Roque of his fears. It was just like at school: during recess his brother wouldn’t move more than two steps from him. Although they never spoke, Roque managed to stay close; he was afraid his classmates would beat him up. Sebastián had been glad when his brother left the school; not because he balked at working alone on the farms, but because his brother lacked guts. It had been a different story before they were sent to the boarding school, but once there, the priests’ food and the fifty-bed dormitories smelling of urine had been too much for him. In just a few months he’d lost weight and gone soft. He didn’t talk to anyone, read the Bible without being told to. He was like someone blessed. The country, thought the elder of the two, made a man of you and that was what his brother needed. The country thickened your skin. You had to sink your boots into the dung, help the mares foal, round up the pigs for slaughter, put hooks in their jaws and butcher the carcasses. You had to be up at six, drink aguardiente with your breakfast to keep out the cold in winter, watch over the livestock. They sold Iberian pigs, lambs, milk, olives, and cereal crops. There was always work to be done. Now he and his brother were going through that process in which your face is lined by the elements, your shoulders broaden, your legs grow sturdier. He hadn’t wanted to believe in the war, but he could no longer ignore it and was clearly nervous. What was the overseer thinking?

The overseer knew that Bartolomé Grande’s reputation for not being one of the slacker absentee landowners, and for working alongside his farmhands, wouldn’t be enough. Socialist ideas had spread and the farmhands had had their fill of poverty and being treated like animals. He didn’t know what was happening in other places. It had been days since anyone had appeared from the east. Only military trucks carrying soldiers and prisoners passed by. Sooner or later, someone would come for Bartolomé Grande’s sons and that would be an awful crime because, when it came down to it, they were just a pair of kids.

After a half-hearted attempt to eat some milk bread, Roque opened a bottle of wine. He and his brother finished the bottle between them, with the overseer’s wife lecturing them: it was no time to be getting drunk, their father never had more than one glass with his dinner. But the younger boy uncorked a second bottle and when they’d drunk half he suggested going for a walk. There was a moon that night, and by its light they moved from place to place, alert to the least movement. The wine had done nothing to calm the younger boy’s anxiety, although that wasn’t the excuse he gave for going outdoors; he said it was too hot to sleep and, anyway, it would be a chance to see what went on at night on the roads while they finished off the wine. But they didn’t sit down or mention the road when it came into view; the younger boy walked ahead, making occasional detours to hide the fact that the dance of the two brothers in the darkness between the holm oaks, carrying their shotguns, was a form of escape or a means of figuring out how long it would take the enemy to reach them, as if in the air that night everything had already happened. Strangely enough, the younger of the two didn’t consider that inevitability as an immediate future but a past in which they had both been killed years before or, to be more precise, were being killed at every moment. He was surprised to find himself surrounded by four men whose clothes smelled of foxskin. The brothers put up no resistance when the men confiscated their shotguns; the older was too astonished and the younger too exhausted. There was just time for Sebastián to say to his brother, “I’ll be fucking damned if I’ll let those men tell us they’ve come to take their revenge on Bartolomé Grange,” before one of them put a gag in his mouth so he couldn’t call out and another, the oldest of the group, stuck a long butcher’s knife in his chest. The younger boy, who was being held by the other two men, watched his brother writhe on the ground. Then he felt an intense pain in his neck as his jugular was cut. The men buried them near a pond, where the ground was softer. They washed off the blood and mud with water from the well and ran off, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be long before they suffered an equally cruel death.

GRANDMOTHER: That’s not how I’d have told it. You’ve written whatever came into your head. My oldest brother was a good student. My father didn’t allow wine on the farms. He only brought it when there was a celebration. He despised drunkards. And we never knew how they were killed. We were told they were held for fifty days in a room at the railway station in El Feriar because our farmhands accused them of supporting the rebels. They said the boys were shot at dawn and buried in the graveyard. My father had it dug up when the war ended, but their bodies weren’t found. I have one of the memorial cards with a picture of my two brothers that my mother handed out on September 8, 1939, during the requiem mass. I keep it in the prayerbook I carry with me around the house, or put it in my cardigan pocket in winter, or my dress pocket in summer. Their deaths still burn inside me. Their undiscovered bodies rest in mine; that’s why I only ever buy cardigans and dresses with pockets.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Rubén Bastida, María Lynch, Albert Puigdueta, Lourdes González, Daniela Martín Hidalgo, and Constantino Bértolo for their close readings and advice.

My thanks also go to Fernando González Ariza, Ana García Navarro, Nere Basabe, and José Ramón Marciada for their factual information.

And, in memoriam, to Joaquina Fernández for the light.