bed. We go out back to smoke, sitting in the grass or on a couple of folding chairs. I tell her things I never told anyone about La Negra; I tell her about the jealousy that ate away at us, and she doesn’t judge me or console me. She just clicks her tongue at certain moments of my story. A couple of times she’s going to suggest that we sleep together, invoking the idea that one nail drives out another, and one of those times I accept. I let her suck me off there outside, under the stars. I look at her, and she’s beautiful and feels splendid. She smiles at me, showing me that sensual gap between her front teeth, but she only gets me to half-mast.
‘You’re too cerebral,’ she tells me after a while.
That night she stays over. Depressed by her presence in my bed, which is nothing but a symbol of La Negra’s absence, I end up kicking her out in the early morning.
She and Alejandro are the only ones I talk to about the matter. With Alejandro when he calls from Santa Teresa on New Year’s, which I’m going to spend at home. He’s going to ask me about the boys and how things are going with Mum and Dad, who say I’ve been very aggressive lately, and I’m going to tell him about La Negra, who has just moved in with the fat wanker, in Shangrilá of all places, and I’m going to talk to him about the mind and the heart. Ale is going to ask me to be more patient with our parents, and he’s going to say that the best thing that could have happened is for Brenda to find another guy, even if it doesn’t seem that way now.
‘Don’t forget about everything that happened,’ he’ll tell me. ‘Don’t forget how badly you ended it. Remember how hard it was for you to get back on your feet.’
Then he’ll tell me about the girls he’s been hooking up with – five, though the season hasn’t technically even started yet – and about a technique he’s developed, the technique of dick rays and pussy rays. The technique consists of looking at the girl with your eyes but also with your dick. You have to feel like you’ve got a ray coming out of your dick that goes into the girl’s pussy. It works. Even if the girl isn’t looking at you, even if she’s laying down sunbathing and looking in another direction, at some point she starts to feel it and she ends up turning toward you; and if the girl is into it, she starts sending you pussy rays. ‘Really, I learned the technique from the girls’, says Ale, ‘from feeling their pussy rays while I was lifeguarding at the beach. Once it’s established that there’s a back and forth between dick rays and pussy rays, all the work is done. You go over to her, you say hi how’s things, and you’re good for the night.’
‘Forget about Brenda,’ he told me. ‘And stop calling her La Negra. It’s too intimate, you’ll never be totally separated that way. And open a Facebook account, it’s perfect for hooking up. Facebook is perfect for dick rays.’
Our last phone conversation will be on 6th January, which Ale is going to take off work so he can visit the family. No one knows, of course, but it will be the last time Alejandro sets foot in our parents’ house. I’ll be the only one who doesn’t go – partly because of the heat, which means taking the kids on the bus will be absolute torture, and partly because I’ll be too caught up with the problems in my personal life.
During that time, I’ll be spending all my energy on finding some way to get the answers I need to keep me from exploding into a thousand pieces, or at least so that Paco and Juan’s day-to-day isn’t miserable, weighed down by their sad, exhausted, absent father. During that time I will have reached the conclusion that, at thirty-seven years old, I don’t know myself in the slightest. Mine though they may be, I don’t know what to do with my mind or my heart, each fighting a battle for itself alone. And my body: it bears up like a beaten animal under the tobacco and the insomnia and my erratic eating, but things can’t go on like that forever. I always go to bed past three in the morning after masturbating to pornography in the living room, the computer’s volume down as low as possible while the boys sleep on the other side of the wall. The page I always left for last had a category of videos starring amateur chicks, women of all ages willing to do anything for a little cash, faces worn down to the skull by poverty or addiction, and every video followed the same procedure. They started with the woman sitting on a torn sofa and the voice of a guy off-camera asking her what her name was, what she did for a living, how many guys she’d been with, if she liked to be fucked like an animal. At some point the guy would pretend to get bored with the protocol and he’d ask her to take her clothes off. While the girl undressed, the guy would tell her how ugly she was. They were ordinary women’s bodies, most pretty run-down, with small or saggy breasts, paunchy stomachs, fat knees, cellulitis. The guy would criticise her arsehole, her legs, and he’d warn her she was going to feel like she’d been hit by a train. Then another guy would come out from behind the camera, his dick hard, arms tattooed, and he’d put the girl on her knees and start to mouth-fuck her. He’d grab her by the ears or the back of her neck with one hand and her throat with the other, and he’d give her one thrust after another while the other guy, who’d never appear, would encourage him to put it all in, to destroy her face. Sometimes, if the girl started to suffer and try to get away, a third guy would emerge to hold her arms behind her back. They’d let her breathe for a couple of seconds and the girl would pant, dripping slobber, her eyeliner all smeared. I’d go to sleep and have nightmares, Brenda’s face mixing with the women’s faces in the videos. I’d get up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit; I had a pain in the back of my neck that only lessened when I lay on my back with my legs up. One of those early mornings, I extracted a single thought from the tumult in my head: I need help. And then: I need to look where I haven’t looked yet, I have to find some order in all this. And the next day I’ll take Paco and Juan to the Tienda Inglesa so they can play in the ball pit and eat nuggets with chips and I’ll go and buy a notebook. I’m going to start writing down my dreams.
The notebook, Papelaria brand, has a hard cover and a drawing of a woman on the front. Pale skin, almond eyes, her peacock-hued hair flows down the notebook’s spine and spills onto the back cover. Although I quit pornography for good and cut down on my masturbation, the plan doesn’t work immediately. The first nights I toss and turn in bed, smoking, looking at the notebook on the nightstand, going into the boys’ room to make sure the mosquitos aren’t biting them. Toward the end of the month, on 29th January, when I’ve already practically forgotten about the dream journal, I’ll have my first dream. I’ll get up right away to write it down: I’m at a party thrown by rich people, in a mansion, and I’m there because I won a raffle. I walk through the rooms, and people greet me with sardonic smiles. Finally, I manage to slip away. I go through some tall doors and find a crowd of people on the other side, some of them waiting to get in, others seemingly waiting for someone famous to come out so they can take a photo. No sooner do I get out the door than I’m being hugged by Ricardo, a friend I’ve barely seen for the past fifteen years, ever since he moved to Barcelona; he pulls me into his car. Ricardo had been my best friend when I was starting out as a writer. He was five years older than me, the same height as me but twice as wide and twice as agile, and when I met him he’d already published two unclassifiable books. They were a schizophrenic cocktail of Boris Vian, Lautrémont and Nick Cave, all mixed with a lot of whisky and insomniac nights, and a play he’d written had won a municipal prize. Where he was incredibly chaotic and garrulous, I, in comparison, was chaotic and silent. Ricardo had had a Dante-esque childhood and still had visions in the middle of the day, visions of rivers of blood and devastated cities. His apartment was a pigsty, the whole place littered with books, magazines and wrappers you had to clear away before you could sit and talk, and the bathroom was all sticky, but the guy, even with that impossible head of his, had taken care of himself since before he’d come of age, and I trusted him more than anyone. I still lived with my parents, and I’d just written Mosh, my first novel. After I’d abandoned Mormonism, the world had become so complex so quickly that for moments at a time I literally saw everything as a blur. Our conversations mainly consisted of Ricardo’s monologues, which I received with rapt attention. Ricardo fed me information about what it meant to be an artist, to be a writer, to be a man. He lent me videos and detective novels. I was a personal project of his. He tried to orient me with his endless knowledge about
