reading

I remember it like it was yesterday. She said to me, ‘Don’t you want your whole life to be happy? To leave behind the things that hurt you? Don’t you want to feel that you’re in control of your life, and not just drifting along in its rip tide?’

And I didn’t reply.

I just sighed, letting a load of air rush out through my nose. My broken tooth appeared in a hopeful smile.

I didn’t say anything, because, when you spend years feeling like life is something that just happens to you, and not something that you make happen, then, sadly, you end up getting used to it being that way.

And then she said, ‘You know that old song, the one that goes, “If you tell me to come, I’ll drop everything”?’

I nodded, still saying nothing; the words wouldn’t come out, emotion had too much of a grip on me. My throat caught, and no sound came.

She went on: ‘Well, I always thought there was something missing from that line. It should be, “If you tell me to come, I’ll drop everything … but tell me to come”.’

And she looked at me. Then she asked me the questions that I had been waiting for years for someone to ask: ‘Do you want to take control of your life? Do you want every moment of it to be yours? Do you?’

And I said ‘yes’. I said the loudest and most powerful ‘yes’ I had uttered in all my forty years on the planet.

A ‘yes’ that stood firmly against the resounding ‘no’ that I had heard only a few hours earlier.

And you’ll need to understand this ‘no’ before I can talk any more about the ‘yes’. If you don’t, nothing will make any sense; you won’t understand any of it.

So it’s crucial that you know what happened in the hours before I met this woman, the woman who would change the way I saw my life, the way I saw my world.

So here goes, the ‘no’ …

A few hours earlier I had argued with my girlfriend. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual or serious about this; we’d been arguing a lot recently.

If anyone had seen us, they would probably have thought that we were about to break up, but that was just how we were on a daily basis.

It was half past seven in the morning. I guessed that it would be light outside soon, but we still needed another two hours or so to argue, and then at least twenty minutes of sex for things to calm down. Needing all this time gave me a strange sense of déjà vu.

Couples and their rituals. Couples and their codes.

Every couple has their unique code, their own way of arguing, of making love, of forgiving, of blaming one another.

But we broke our usual pattern that day; there was no two hours of arguing, no twenty minutes of sex afterwards. I knew it when I saw her looking at me. It was a look I didn’t recognize, no words accompanied it.

Normally, whenever she looked at me, she spoke to me; this was one of the many things I liked about her. So, when she looked at me like that, without a sound, I froze, completely.

It was as if she was on the verge of saying something like, ‘This isn’t working’, or ‘I’m sick of arguing’, or ‘Why are we like this if we love each other so much?’ But she just looked at me.

And it was in that exact moment, as she was looking at me – strange and intense – that I remembered a phrase I had heard a few months ago at a dance show.

It was a performance in memory of Freddie Mercury and other artists who had died young. Or maybe it was something else. I can’t really remember.

I don’t much like dancing myself, but I do love dance. I love to see bodies in motion, unfamiliar songs coming together with the rhythms of the choreography. It stimulates me – in the emotional sense, I mean.

And, from time to time, like on that night, I’ll hear a phrase that hits me like an arrow, piercing straight into my heart.

That night, somewhere between one incredible movement and the next, the principal dancer cried out: ‘You told us to make love, not war. And we listened to you. So why does love make war on us?’

I smiled as I remembered. And my girlfriend just kept on looking at me. Then she said: ‘I have to leave you, Dani.’

I have to. I have to. That cut me.

I considered this for a moment. All of those verbs – ‘have to’, ‘must’ – always seemed elegant to me. There are few verbs that have such a precise meaning. You know that when you use them, you are taking a firm stance, coming down definitively on one side or the other of a question.

‘You have to?’ I asked.

‘I have to.’

Another silence.

I had to try to convince her to stay.

And how better to do that than with our own special way of saying ‘I love you’. Every couple has one. Our way came from the first film we saw together. It was a film that I had seen years before I met her, during a special time in my life, and because it meant so much to me, I had decided to share it with her.

It was Jean-Luc Godard’s magnificent film Breathless. In it, the legendary actor Jean-Paul Belmondo is at his best – he was never more ‘Belmondo’ than in that movie.

Our special sequence takes place in a car; there’s a lot of talking in the scene, but only three lines really stuck with us, and we would always say them to each other, one after the other, without stopping, just like we had first heard them, like they had struck us.

It was our way of saying ‘I love you’. Whipping out those three little sentences had never before failed to calm down an argument or defuse some tense moment.

I was the one who would say the first and third lines; she would say the second. Although, actually, sometimes it was the other way round. It just depended on who needed to bring the other one back to sanity, back to love.

We barely ever used it.

The trick for something like this to work so magically is to use it only in desperate situations.

I looked straight at her; I wanted her to know that this was one of those moments.

‘I can’t live without you,’ I said, putting as much Jean-Paul Belmondo into my face as possible.

She looked at me and said nothing. I tried again: ‘I can’t live without you.’

She kept looking at me.

Her eyes said ‘no’. Then her head said ‘no’. Then she said it out loud, the clearest ‘no’ I had ever heard in all my life. It was so absolute that I knew that everything was over.

Even though, maybe, it didn’t have to be the end, her refusal to play our little game was a definite sign that it was all coming to an end.

I tried physical contact, my last resort. I moved towards her, but she waved me off before I could reach her.

I knew that there were at least fifteen good reasons why she might want to leave me, but there was one that seemed more likely than the rest.

And, just when I was about to ask her why she was leaving me, my work mobile began to ring. It only ever rang in extremely urgent cases.

I didn’t know whether to pick it up, this was so clearly not the right time, and, if I did pick up, it would almost certainly be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I don’t know why I did, but I answered.

The moment I said ‘hello’, she got up and walked to our bedroom.

It was just then that I remembered some words of wisdom given to me by one of my gurus, a man I had met when I went to have my tonsils taken out, years ago.

I was only in the same hospital as him for a couple of days, back in my home town, but he left his mark on my life. It had been some time since I had thought about him, maybe too much time. But my girlfriend’s ‘no’ had immediately brought him back into my mind.

I suppose that I should tell you about him, because if you don’t know what I experienced at his side thirty years ago, it’ll be difficult for you to understand why I am the way I am, and why she did not want to stay with me.

For better or for worse, I became who I am thanks to Mr Martin. It was his fault.

But, before my memory takes me further back into the past, with the strange soundtrack of her packing up her things in the other room, I need to say Godard’s three sentences, the ones that once meant ‘I love you’.

‘I can’t live without you.’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘Yes, but I don’t want to.’

I whispered them to myself, softly.

But it’s hard to feel good about saying ‘I love you’ on your own.

The day I met Mr Martin, I had been sent to hospital, at the age of ten, to have my tonsils taken out. He was just about to say goodbye to a lung and a half.

I was so scared when I went into the room that I inadvertently managed to calm him down.

‘I thought I was the most frightened person in the world, but you must be three times as scared as I am. That makes me feel much better,’ he said, very seriously.

He was very big – over six and a half feet tall, and about twenty stone.

Everything about him was excessive, extreme: he was over ninety years old and his greyish beard foamed all over his face.

I would’ve been scared of him if I’d seen him in the street, but there, in a hospital gown that didn’t even cover his backside, he seemed completely harmless.

My parents had already left me to go and fill in the hospital paperwork, and I felt relieved that he hadn’t met them. Back then, I felt embarrassed by them.

My chief ally against this giant was a nurse who didn’t seem to have much interest in me, but who was, at least, more or less normal in terms of height, weight and age.

But my human shield disappeared as soon as she had me settled into my vast hospital bed.

So I was left alone with the most immense, imposing person I’d ever shared a room with. No one had ever taken up so much of the oxygen in a room; I’d never been so aware of someone else’s breathing.

We didn’t say anything. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

The first two minutes were extremely tense. He could smell my fear, but it didn’t seem as if he was going to attack. Finally he broke the deadlock.

‘My name is Martin. What’s yours?’

He held out his hand. I didn’t know whether to take it.

My parents had told me that I should never talk to strangers. Although in theory Mr Martin wasn’t a complete stranger, because I’d be sleeping next to him for the next three nights, provided everything went smoothly.

It was odd. He was a stranger who would have to become, quickly, by force of circumstances, someone I knew very well.

‘Dani.’

It was barely a whisper, but I think he heard me.

I took the hand he was holding out, and squeezed hard. He smiled, and didn’t squeeze back. It was a nice gesture. He was letting me think I was stronger than him.

Just as I was about to say something else, a porter appeared to take him into surgery.

The man spoke to him with a distractingly loud voice. It’s odd how people think they need to talk like that to the elderly. As though they’re somehow making things easier by shouting at them, or speaking extremely slowly.

‘Hello, Mr Martin. It is time to go into surgery. Is there anyone waiting for you? Where is your companion?’

Mr Martin waved his hand to make him speak a little more quietly. The sight of it made me giggle …

‘I don’t have a companion,’ he replied, without seeming to feel any kind of embarrassment.

‘You don’t have anyone to wait for you outside while they are operating?’ the twenty-year-old orderly said, in a tone that was almost rude.

‘Oh, I have lots of people who’ll be there if things go wrong. There’s just no one who’ll be there if things go right.’

Now the porter was embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

‘I’m not. I’m not a part of this age any more. It’s normal that my people wouldn’t be here, isn’t it?’

The three of us were silent.

I’d never imagined that there might be people who had no one to wait for them at the surgery door. No one that the doctors could talk to about what was happening, apologizing for the delays, explaining the complications and the problems.

‘What are they going to do to you?’ I asked, putting on my best adult voice.

He turned and looked over at me again.

‘They’re going to leave me with half a lung. Just enough to breathe in and out a little. But I don’t need much at my age. They’ve said that you can live with only a quarter of a lung. So I’ll have more than enough.’

I was stunned. I was only there to get my tonsils taken out, and I had my mother, my two living grandparents and my brother with me. He was going to lose most of his lungs, and he had nobody there with him, waiting for him to come out of surgery.

I think this was the exact moment when I first realized that the world was unfair. Ever since that moment, I’ve seen so much injustice that I’ve stopped counting up the individual instances, living with them almost without being upset.

‘I’ll wait for you,’ I said, almost without knowing what I was saying. ‘I’ll be your companion.’

He smiled for the first time. It was a very happy smile.

He came over to me and gave me a hug. And, as he hugged me, I felt his fear, all the fear that he had before that operation which would stop him from taking in as much air as he wanted, as much as he needed to breathe.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered. ‘It’s better for me to go in there knowing that someone will be waiting for me when I come out. It’ll make me feel like I’m going through all this for someone, and that’s important. Did you know that, in a theatre, they only put on the show if there are at least as many people in the audience as there are in the cast?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, now I can act, because I have my audience. I’ll do a good job for you.’

He let go of me and stopped whispering.

The porter took him away. Once I was on my own, I realized that I had taken on a great responsibility.

He would be in surgery for almost eight hours and I had decided to be a proper hospital companion to him.

A kid of ten responsible for a man of ninety.

It seemed perfectly normal to me at the time. Now, it seems a little odd.

Although everything seems a bit different now. Without her, without our code, our way of saying ‘I love you’, I feel a little bereft.

I know that you’ll want to know whether Mr Martin came back from surgery with just half a lung left, but first I need to tell you more about my journey to meet that woman, the woman who thought that some love songs could do with having their titles extended.

So I need to go back to that phone call, to the new job I was being asked to take on.

PENGUIN BOOKS

IF YOU TELL ME TO COME, I’LL DROP EVERYTHING, JUST TELL ME TO COME

Albert Espinosa

IF YOU TELL ME TO COME, I’LL DROP EVERYTHING, JUST TELL ME TO COME

Translated by James Womack

PENGUIN BOOKS

1

IF YOU TELL ME TO COME, I’LL DROP EVERYTHING … JUST TELL ME TO COME

2

IT’S HARD TO FEEL GOOD SAYING ‘I LOVE YOU’ ON YOUR OWN

3

THE LONELINESS OF HAVING NO ONE THERE, WAITING FOR YOU

4

SOMETIMES A COUPLE HAS SO MUCH BAGGAGE THAT NOT EVEN LOVE CAN LIFT THEM UP