The right of Juan Jose Millas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

© Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., 2006,

Avda.Diagonal, 662-664-08034 Barcelona

Translation © 2012 White Night Publishing

Originally published in 2006 in Spanish by Editorial Seix Barral, S.A.

First published in English by White Night Publishing

c/o Thauoos and Co., 1^st Floor, 201 High Street, Penge, London SE20 7PF

ISBN: 9781905603084

www.whitenightpublishing.com

Front Cover Design: Bolt from the Blue

The apartment where the telephone was now ringing had two bedrooms and a living room. The living room gave out on a narrow street of the centre and had two adjoining rooms; the one on the left, very similar to an American food bar, for eating, and the one on the right, with the television being its nucleus, for living. The windows of the rooms, forming a rectangle, looked out over an inner court to which the lines for hanging out the washing lent an organic aspect as if the patio were the air passage that the building breathed through. The bathroom, without any windows, was right next to one of the bedrooms. The other was used as a workroom though if Laura and Julio became parents it would be the room for their child.

Laura and Julio tended to allow the phone to ring four times, and it was always Laura who picked it up, and whose face, on this occasion, after listening to what was said at the other end, acquired the rigidity of a mask whose lower opening… the mouth… was barely capable of pronouncing two or three monosyllables before hanging up. Then, talking more to herself than to her husband, she said that a car had just run into Manuel.

Before losing consciousness she added they asked him whom they should notify and he gave them our number.

The news of the accident divided Saturday afternoon into two parts with the precision of a scalpel separating flesh. From his wife’s face, Julio worked out that once they’d settled the practical questions, they would have to face a great feeling of loss, and so he proposed a number of useless things to put off this moment, which she didn’t bother to listen to. As the minutes passed, when Laura returned to her body like a bird returning to its cage after having crashed into the walls, they realised that they didn’t have the key to Manuel’s apartment (although he had theirs), which made it impossible to go in there to look for the telephone number or the address of a relation to whom they could delegate the management of things. And of the pain. It was then that Julio realised that they’d maintained a surprising familiarity with someone about whom they knew hardly anything. The problem was that their marriage without this individual already seemed incomplete. The unsettled, humid atmosphere of the afternoon made its way into the apartment and, like a funereal sigh, breathed on the spirit of the couple. On the television, switched to mute, was an advertisement for a perfume starting its Christmas campaign.

We appear to be left widowed said Julio caustically to lighten the atmosphere, although it only served to increase the tension since Laura, after reproaching him for giving Manuel up for dead, burst into tears.

This Manuel, who had just suffered an accident, had installed himself in the apartment next to theirs two years ago. Although they were all the same age, the marriage had placed itself under his tutorship, or played at doing so. They had got to know each other one day when Julio had to call at their door to let them know that a damp patch had appeared in his rooms.

I think it’s coming from your kitchen he added.

Manuel made way for him, and after examining the washbowl stand together, they detected a small trickle of water that Julio, a keen DIY man, repaired in two minutes. Afterwards, he invited Manuel to come for a coffee in his place and presented him to Laura. The encounter ended with the establishing of a protocol that they would mutually aid each other when necessary.

Scarcely any time had passed when, coming back from the shooting of a film whose set he was designing, Julio found his neighbour in his living room, talking with Laura in an animated way. He’d come over to ask for a cup of olive oil, and they’d made a supper date. Julio secretly celebrated the developing relationship since his wife and he had insensibly withdrawn from the world since the married.

That night, Manuel wore jeans, a white shirt and a black jacket. Although the jacket was sporty and in the opinion of Julio should have been accompanied by a tie, the apparently random choice suited him well. Manuel always gave the impression of having taken off his tie a few minutes before although he was never seen wearing one. With his way of dressing, or moving or talking, he made it understood that he’d come from somewhere classier, but was capable of placing himself at the level of whoever he’d just come across.

A while after Julio sat down at the table, Manuel contemplated the pair with a malicious twinkle, and stated that they looked like brother and sister.

You look like brother and sister.

But seeing that they received his comment uneasily as if they didn’t know whether it was supposed to be praise or criticism, he added in a natural tone of voice that he was in favour of incest, and that all love was, in the end, incestuous.

We fall in love with what’s familiar to us. Don’t look at me like that. If I’d had a sister, either I’d have seduced her, or I’d have let her seduce me.

Whatever the case, he tended to wrap up his most extravagant statements in an ironic tone which made the listener doubt that he meant it seriously.

Manuel was thin and flexible like steel wire. His head had something of a light bulb about it whose essence was this wire which was always illuminated with thoughts as delicate as the resistance of a bulb. Sometimes it gave the impression that the resistor, after subtly vibrating, had blown. But it was only resting so as to shine later with a greater intensity.

After supper, they’d gone into the zone of the living room where the sofa was. Julio remembered Manuel with a cup of wine in his hand (a wine he’d brought over from his place) saying, “you’ve got a sofa” with a mixture of amused astonishment and dismay which hurt. Julio was a designer, and he wasn’t unaware that a sofa was a sign of being conventional, but it turned out to be the correct convention for furnishing this space. Going forward, every time that Manuel presented himself in the couple’s apartment to drink a glass or wine or to see a movie and made himself comfortable at one end of the sofa like a foetus in the uterus, Julio was at the point of reminding him about his contempt for that piece of furniture, but he never did so.

They continued talking about incest. Manuel assured them that at times, in life, you came across new things, but it was always the result of seeking out old ones.

What’s the reason for going to Mars? To see if there’s water, what an amazing rarity, water. And we’re exploring the Universe to find out if there’s life, to see if there’s more of the same. Men, whether they know it or not, marry their mothers and women their fathers because these are their models. If people knew who they’re really fucking when they’re fucking their partner, they’d be horrified.

And you? Who are you fucking? asked Laura, and immediately went red.

I don’t have a model because I don’t have a mother.

After the dessert, Julio offered Manuel a whisky which was refused on the grounds that he didn’t drink distilled liquids, only wine. He also didn’t take sparkling drinks because, although he didn’t put it like that, they gave the impression of one’s being vulgar.

Two years after this scene, Julio hadn’t managed to work out what was wrong with distilled or carbonised drinks. As far as he was concerned, wine gave him an acid stomach and a headache. He only drank gin and tonic, a cultural combination which united everything that Manuel hated, apparently on good rational grounds. On that formative evening, before the guest retired, Julio put the table back, took the crockery out to the sink and continued to listen to the conversation while he washed the dishes. When his neighbour and his wife begged him to leave it until the following day, he argued that it upset him, going to bed without having put everything back in place. Manuel made a sarcastic comment about this obsession with cleanliness, and Laura confirmed that her husband was full of manias.

Is he one of those who wash their hands every ten minutes? asked Manuel.

He’s not gone that far smiled Laura.

They splashed around like people who’d been wrecked in the middle of Saturday afternoon, asking themselves what to do or who to call to tell them about their friend’s accident when it occurred to Julio to call the Ministry of External Affairs because he’d heard Manuel say that his father was a diplomat. Half an hour after having spoken to a functionary who gave them what information he had, the telephone rang, and Manuel’s father manifested himself at the other end of the line. In spite of the tragic circumstances, Laura, who had let the phone ring four times, brought him up to date with the situation. A rather neutral voice, very polite, as she later told Julio, thanked her and asked her the name of the hospital that had taken his son in and let her know that it would take him no less than 24 hours to present himself in Madrid, since he had to fly in from Asia.

Having gone through this phase, the married couple went through the cold afternoon and the indifferent city on Justin’s motorbike, both covered with special outfits that isolated their bodies from the external atmosphere and locked them inside their heads and thoughts by helmets that evoked the texture and form of the cranium of certain insects. In the hospital, they received the information that should have been given to his family, and, overcome, they looked at the inert body of Manuel connected to a variety of apparatuses which controlled his vital signs (this is what the doctor called them, constantes vitales, an expression that repeated itself again and again in Julio’s brain, like the chorus of a song heard on waking). They didn’t spend much time there because the rules didn’t allow it, but also because the smell of the hospital was making Laura ill who, once back on the street, enclosed herself in her motorcycle outfit and helmet as if she were closing herself up inside herself.

That night they got into bed together without saying anything: for some time they had spoken to each other through Manuel and didn’t know how to do it in his absence. Ever since that day when he had come to ask for a cupful of olive oil and stayed for supper, the neighbour’s presence had been constant. Neither he nor they could live without each other. He could always be seen in Laura and Julio’s place, and Manuel soon had a key, which he used with discretion, to come and go as he pleased. He didn’t have an outside job since he turned out to be a writer. At least, he presented himself as one, a writer of great talent, though without any tangible evidence of being one.

How do you know that you’ve got any talent if you’ve never tried to demonstrate it? Julio had once asked him.

It just shows he answered with a touch of arrogance. It was my writer’s nose that drove me to make friends with you, for example.

What does that have to do with it?

You people don’t notice it, but you’re very novelesque characters, whether you’re looked at jointly or severally. I could write a novel about the two of you, but it’s better to live you than write you.

What have I got to do with a character in a novel? asked Laura, flattered by Manuel’s comment.

Ambiguity.

And what’s that supposed to mean?

That you can be understood in a multitude of ways, all of them plausible. You’re a coded text.

And me? What have I got to do with a character in a novel asked Julio, more to burst the bubble which Manuel and his wife had installed themselves in than through genuine curiosity.

You’re mad

You think I’m mad?

Completely. If you really want me to tell you, I imagine you as someone who one day in his youth realised he was mad and since then hasn’t done anything else but try to hide it. And neither your family, nor your wife, nor your friends have noticed it, but we two know you’re mad; you because you suffer from it, and I because I’m a writer.

A writer without any writings Julio had added with a smile, in order to hide the state of confusion the words of his neighbour had placed him in.

Relatively speaking. The description I’ve just produced of you is a masterpiece.

The three of them laughed, some more than others. While he was laughing, Julio suffered a personality split which reminded him of the following event in his infancy: he was heading for school holding his mother hand, when a blind child crossed his path holding his own mother’s hand. Julio looked at the child with curiosity, perhaps even with impertinence, and at that moment it was as if the light coming from a nuclear explosion had burst inside his head; reality filled itself with a white aura so intense that the passers-by became phantoms and the street a backdrop. The experience couldn’t have lasted more than two or three seconds, during which Julio saw himself from the point of view of the blind child. On the aura dissipating and the previous order returning to the street, the blind child was contemplating Julio with his unlit eyes, and he (Julio) had asked his mother if they could cross the street. Now he had just split into becoming Manuel. For a fraction of a second, when the aura again appeared and momentarily froze the laughs, Julio knew… because it wasn’t a matter of a feeling, but of facts… that during those instants he had been inside Manuel’s body without abandoning his own.

And what do writers without writings live off? he continued to ask in order to cover up the experience he had just undergone, but also to clearly point our Manuel’s uselessness.

Don’t be crude the writer limited himself to saying. –You and I know that making a living is vulgar.

It took Manuel’s father almost three days to arrive. He was coming from China, which seemed to Julio the same as coming from Mars. China was a sufficiently ambiguous and remote territory to represent a dimension of reality different from his own.

He bumped into him at the entrance to the hospital. He would have recognised him miles away, not only became of his similar physique to his son, but for a form of elegance which reduced his suit and overcoat to a wrapping. His distinction, thought Julio, comes from within. After introducing himself, he headed for the elevator, secretly watching the motion of the man’s arms and legs which were attached to his trunk more as decorative elements than useful extensions. He appeared the indefinite age of an ambassador and called himself Manuel like his son which was also a sign of distinction as opposed to the unrefined Manolo which people with this name tend to adopt.

Julio was wearing his motorcycle outfit with a zip that went down to his belt, and he was carrying his helmet which was his way of saying that he had just arrived, or was on the point of leaving, a look he liked to cultivate above any other.

When they reached the floor for intensive care, rather than turning up immediately in the sick man’s room, Manuel’s father stopped to talk with deliberation to the nurses, requesting the presence of the person in charge with such authority that a doctor immediately turned up. Julio kept himself in the background while they talked, but then followed the diplomat to where the body of his friend was to be found. Although he remained connected to tubes and a number of machines, he gave the impression he was himself in all his vigour, that he made the apparatuses function rather than the reverse. People like Manuel and his father, Julio thought, dressed from the inside out, so that each day on rising, they put on their ideas, and over the ideas their viscera, and over the viscera their muscles until they got to the material of their clothes. He personally dressed from the outside in. First he put on his motorcycle outfit, and then the informal wear that would be expected of a set designer, and then the epidermis, the dermis, the ribs….. hoping that all this outer design would put in place an original character, a different way of thinking, an unexpected way of facing up to the world. Did he manage it?

Manuel knew he was in a coma ultimately, in the same way that his father knew he was awake. Julio took note of the slightly enigmatic expression of the man. You couldn’t say that he didn’t feel pain, but it consisted of, put it this way, an elegant pain.

After staying a while gazing at the body of his son, with his overcoat hanging from his left arm, he looked a Julio and made a gesture of impotence.

You could see in his manner of walking, of moving, that he wasn’t afraid. Manuel had once explained to him that the food of mean-mindedness was fear, and Julio had noticed it in himself. People like Julio and his father acted in a different existential sphere. No one could take away from them what they possessed because their principle resource was intangible. The other things that could be touched constituted an extension of the first which would reproduce itself, in the case that it were lost, like a lizard’s tail. They lived in a world where making a living wasn’t a preoccupation.

Would you like a coffee? asked Julio.

The man looked at his watch and accepted.

The cafeteria was on the lowest floor of the building and from the table at which they were seated you could see the lipless border of the city. The diplomat asked for a tea that was not usually drunk, and Julio tonic water, which his friend’s father regarded in a disapproving way. Normally, Julio would have used the familiar form with the father of a friend, but he addressed Manuel formally.

What did the doctor say?

Technically speaking he’s in a coma. It’s not a case where he could make any predictions. The symptoms, once the wounds heal and the tissue damage vanishes, tend to improve.

I see.

I’d like to thank you and your wife as well on behalf of myself, for having looked after everything. I had already received news of you from Manuel. You’re like his family.

Julio blushed, but he wasn’t given time for anything else because the man said he had to go. People like him were always going from one place to another. They had a formal relationship with the present which was maintained through an airport. If anything pleased Julio about airports, it was precisely this, that nobody belonged there, but to the place they had come from or were going to. When they arrived at the door of the hospital, Manuel’s father moved his head right and left, and immediately in response to this, a car appeared.

Can I drop you off anywhere? he asked as if the motorcycle disguise, including the helmet, were invisible.

Thanks, I’ve got my motorcycle here he replied.

That same night, in bed, when Laura asked what Manuel’s father was like, Julio replied he was normal.

Normal in what way?

In the rich person’s way. He comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else. He gives the impression that he came in to see his son because he was passing by.

Was he crying?

I don’t believe he was.

Fine, so what did he say?

Nothing, that according to the doctor it is difficult to provide a prognosis in these cases, that you can be in a coma for seven days or seven months, sometimes seven years. And that he could drop me off, because when we came out to the street, he made a magic pass with his hand and a car appeared for him.

Julio was lying still on his back, with his hands crossed behind his neck and his gaze lost in the high ceiling. Laura had shrunk herself into a foetal position, turning her back to him, maybe with her eyes open. They used to sleep with the blinds closed to gain an absolute darkness, but if you stayed alert, sooner or later patches of light would appear. They shared a bolster which during the night would shift itself onto her side though the mattress was slightly inclined his way. They never used white sheets and slept on their right side with Laura’s shoulder against Julio’s chest, and their legs intertwined like the roots of two trees. Although nothing had taken place between the two of them, Laura had obstinately not spoken a word throughout the supper, an attitude he had responded to with a sullen silence. Then they’d watch the same program on television as if from different dimensions, and they’d lain down on the same mattress as if they were lying down in different beds. This form of arguing without arguing had erupted into their behaviour with the appearance of Manuel, possibly because he was the dark material of disharmony, possibly because this kind of dispute required the existence of an intermediary. Generally, the discomfort was diluted by his arrival in the same way that day follows night.

After a while, although Julio had concluded that Laura had gone to sleep, he felt a small convulsion.

What’s wrong?

Nothing

What do you mean nothing? You’re crying he added, abandoning his former position to embrace her.

I’m not she answered between sobs.

What are you crying about?

Nothing.

Tell, me what’s wrong, please he insisted, worried.

I’m pregnant.

For more than two years, they hadn’t talked about the possibility of having children, after having tried to get Laura pregnant for months. As neither of the two, perhaps through fear of the answer, had suggested turning up at the doctor’s, they had stopped talking about the subject as you stop talking about an irremediable illness. During the passage from desire to silence, Manuel had appeared in their lives, whom they treated with such care that he had come to occupy, in a certain way, the place of a child.