CHAPTER 32

And what’s eating you?” Asunción asked Gaby as soon as María and Berta had left.

Asunción’s ability to pay attention to several bleeding hearts at once was truly remarkable. In the midst of everything that had just happened, as well as concentrating on the mess María was in, she had been watching Gaby out of the corner of her eye and noticing how downcast and unusually silent she was. Although Gaby was naturally curious, she hadn’t said a word during the whole conversation. She had stayed to one side, like a UN observer, not asking questions or making any comments, head down and somewhat distracted, letting herself be pulled along and feigning an interest that she didn’t really feel.

“What do you mean, what’s eating me?” Gaby said with a start.

“Something’s up. Don’t try to brush me off, I know you.”

Then Gaby crumbled.

Asunción bit her tongue and regretted having stuck her nose in where she wasn’t wanted. Each person’s life is her own, Asunción, how naïve can you be? You only just finished clearing up the fallout from the pregnancy thing and now you’ve put your big fat foot in it again.

After an age of tears and apologies, Gaby managed to tell her between sobs that Franklin wanted to go back to Argentina.

“Then go with him, silly,” Asunción replied. “The timing couldn’t be better, love. You’re about to lose your job, you’re free, you don’t have kids to tie you to Madrid. What’s stopping you?”

“Franklin’s stopping me. He says he wants to go alone.”

“Without you?”

“Yes, without me. In our case, ‘alone’ means without me.”

The bombshell had dropped that very morning before she left for the office. Like every other day of their shared life, Franklin had gotten up first, turned on the grill to make toast, made coffee, heated milk, and gone back to the bedroom to wake Gaby up with a good-morning kiss.

And he had found her crying.

She told him she had dreamed about her baby. They were tears of happiness because she was sure it was a premonition and her body clearly knew that soon, really soon, she was going to get pregnant. After hugging him, still crying, she told him how much she loved him.

“And then, Franklin, just like that, goes and says, ‘Look, princess, I think the best thing for both of us is if I go back to Argentina.’ ”

“But how can that be the best for both of you!”

“That’s what I said, Asunción. What the fuck was he going on about?”

Franklin Livingstone knew that his future in Argentina, far away from Gaby, would consist of a cold, lonely street, two or three cardboard boxes, a bottle of cheap booze, and a kind of slow, painful living death plagued with memories that would end up merging with his drunken dreams. But he also knew that the time had come to leave Gaby so that she could become a mother.

He cried as well.

“Are you two crazy?” Asunción burst out, emboldened after María’s dressing-down. “I’ve never met a couple so in love as you and Franklin. You could be peacefully enjoying your love, but instead you spend all your time looking for problems where there aren’t any. You want children? Then adopt them, sweetie, the world’s full of babies in need of parents who’ll love them. Do you think that there’s only one way to have a child? No, for goodness’ sake, there are all sorts of ways. My aunt Paca, for example, who’s happily single, looked after me and my brothers when our parents died. That was the end of her peace and quiet. And she’s been a wonderful second mother to us, even though she never planned to start a family.”

“But I don’t want to have just any old babies,” replied Gaby. “I want to have Franklin’s babies.”

“They will be Franklin’s, Gaby, as well as yours. They’ll have his mannerisms and habits. Even an Argentinean accent, silly.”

Gaby’s tears dried up. She got up from the chair, gave Asunción a big kiss, and went out in search of Franklin Livingstone, the love of her life.

Asunción turned off all the lights in the office, unplugged the printer, and poured the coffee down the sink. Without a shadow of a doubt, the working day was over. It was ten 10:30 a.m. and there was nothing to do. How quickly children grow up. She sighed and then remembered that in a couple of days it was her sons’ little half sister’s birthday. She should go to El Corte Inglés and buy her a doll like the ones she used to love when she was a girl. “Tell her it’s from her Aunty Asunción, who sends lots of love,” she would say to them as usual, secretly longing for the day when her ex-husband and his new wife would split up, as she was sure would happen sooner or later, so she could take care of the little one on alternate weekends. She knew how incapable her ex-husband would be of looking after a girl.