22

ADRIANA

Friday, March 9, 2012

I t was two o’clock in the morning when I asked for my last small bottle of water in the Moby Dick. A rock group from the nineties with a hard-to-pronounce name was playing, but I had agreed to go because my friend Clara had become nostalgic and felt like letting her hair down once she resolved to go out with me without her husband.

I had called her a few days earlier, right after I decided to catch a flight to Madrid to check out any possible trace of Héctor and Kyra at the Complutense. Iago had turned up on the Monday, calendar in hand, to change the dates of various meetings on the pretext that he was going to an anthropology conference at the Berkeley campus of the University of California for a few days. I searched for the conference on the Internet and confirmed that everything was as he’d told me. The dates matched, so it was possible he was telling the truth. But I couldn’t stop thinking that in reality he was going to San Francisco to check out the Kronon Corporation, just as I’d heard them discussing from the tunnel behind my bookshelf. At that point I knew that I didn’t want to go on working like this, being suspicious of everything the Holy Trinity did.

As soon as the tornado that was Iago rushed out the door, I made my way to Héctor’s office and asked him for a few days’ leave to go to Madrid, with the excuse that I still had some matters to sort out that hadn’t been resolved because of my hasty move. I booked a room in the Hotel Cuzco, but I refused to let my father know about my visit to the capital. I still didn’t feel ready to grapple with him and the appendix that his new family represented for me. I also wanted to have a break from the awkward topic of my mother’s suicide note. I had choked it down, but I hadn’t finished digesting all of it yet.

In other words, my trip to Madrid was a flight no matter how you looked at it.

Once I’d landed at Barajas Airport, I spent Thursday looking for information in the administrative office of the Complutense’s Biological Sciences Faculty. There was nothing conclusive, so, in a last-ditch effort, I called Mercedes Poveda, who had been my mentor throughout my university career, and organized to visit her in her little house in the mountains on Saturday morning. Mercedes was almost ninety, but her mind was still remarkably lucid. I thought she might be able to give me some clues regarding the two academics who had worked with her in the seventies. And, unsure whether my trip was going to be fruitful or just a waste of time, I arranged to meet Clara in the same pub near Avenida Castellana where she and I had drowned our work frustrations so many times on weekdays the year before.

Clara and I had been the youngest employees at the National Museum of Archaeology. She was two years older than me and had a lot more common sense, which was undoubtedly a great help to me during the year I spent as a slave under the yoke of Federico Santos. She was also the one who had introduced me to my ex-boyfriend, Rubén, in her top-floor apartment on the Gran Vía during a meal with all her husband’s colleagues from the labor law practice he managed. Clara was one of the few friends who had maintained her link with both of us after I had left Rubén, so she was an exception definitely worth keeping.

The Moby Dick was a bar decorated with a maritime theme. Going down the stairs was like being teleported to the interior of an old sailing ship, with its inevitable rudder, shark’s jaw, pictures of knots, and other nautical decorations.

As soon as I entered the wooden bowels of the Moby Dick, I recognized the dark hair and smiling face of my friend, beer in hand, waiting for me among all the other people there. She still wore her hair much longer in front and almost shaved in the back, as if it grew on the diagonal like that due to some strange genetic condition. I felt myself relax because, for the first time in months, I was back to being a normal person who’d arranged to meet a friend for the sole purpose of having a good time.

“I think I’m glad your husband didn’t come too. He must still hate me for breaking up with Rubén,” I said by way of a greeting, shouting louder than usual so she could hear me.

Clara kissed me on both cheeks, and we settled ourselves on two stools at the bar.

“He got over it as soon as your ex started focusing on his work again and stopped losing all the cases he’d been assigned.”

“I’m delighted—for both of them.”

“Stop feeling guilty. I’m not going to be the one who tells you that you made a mistake when you left him.”

“Well, believe me, it’s a relief to be sitting next to the only person who hasn’t. In any event, let’s stop talking about all that. I’ve moved on.”

“And by the way, I see you haven’t lost your sex appeal,” she said, speaking with the voice of a brothel owner.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of the blue-eyed guy who hasn’t stopped looking at you since you came in. Don’t turn around. He’s coming over here.”

I did as I was told and ignored him. Clara and I spent the next two hours catching up with each other in very loud voices while the dreadful band punished our hearing. When I realized that Clara had been sneaking a look at her watch for some time, I decided to give the blue-eyed, dark-haired guy his opportunity. He’d taken a seat behind my friend and was waiting for me to give him a look of permission to deploy his deadly form. He waited patiently while I said good-bye to Clara and her knowing smile but then wasted no time in occupying her vacant barstool.

“You come here often, don’t you?” he said, looking directly at me. “Your face looks familiar.”

“Yes, every Friday at about this time,” I lied.

“That’s what I thought,” he lied in return.

I inspected him under the irritating bar lights. A bit smug, not quite as tall as . . . Not quite as tall as who, Dana? I reprimanded myself. Well, in any event, he’ll do.

The look we exchanged asked, Are you the one who’s going to make my evening worthwhile?

An hour later we were panting on top of the blue carpet in my hotel room. When we were done, he took a shower while I slithered under the sheet.

“That was a novel experience,” he shouted through the shower curtain.

“You’re kidding,” I replied skeptically.

“I’m serious. I’ve never done it long-distance before,” he answered, with an irony that seemed to be his preferred style.

“I thought you enjoyed it,” I said defensively.

“Technically, it was good,” he said, coming back into the room, a brief towel covering the bare necessities.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, it was very good.”

“So, what’s the complaint?” My look pierced him like a bullet.

“That I was on my own the whole time. Where were you, girl?”

In a cave nearly three hundred miles away, looking at tectiforms , I thought of replying.

For once I didn’t brush my hair from my face but let out a sigh when I saw there was no way of fixing this.

“Let’s see, Elías—”

“Eloy,” he corrected me.

“Right. Eloy. Look, I think it would be better if you left now. I have to catch an early flight and . . . ”

It was a lie, but any excuse was fine at that hour of the morning, and my brain was on autopilot.

“It’s five in the morning and so cold outside I don’t even want to think about it,” he said, sitting down next to me on the bed. “Let’s sleep for a couple of hours, and I promise I won’t be a pain when we wake up.”

I looked at him one last time. Maybe in different circumstances, maybe in another life, maybe . . . but no. Allowing a six-foot-one-inch mistake into my bed to sleep beside me left me cold.

“Look, I have only one rule: no sleeping over,” I told him without giving him the option to reply.

I actually have more than one rule: not to challenge my boss at the first opportunity; not to drink during dinners with work colleagues; not to make a fool of myself analyzing my coworkers’ handwriting; and above all, not to become infatuated with my immediate superior . . . In summary, all those rules I’ve been systematically breaking ever since I met your double .

“Okay, okay. I get it,” he said, pulling on his pants and turning his back on me in a final attempt at self-respect. “A woman with standards. Well, then, until next time.”

And he closed the door behind him before I could return his “until next time.”