10 a.m. One hour waiting outside Julio Verne. I arrived at nine, when people are leaving for work, just in time to see Facundo hurrying out, dragging and nagging Alejandra. The two of them were running late, him for work and her for school. Then Cristian came out, in sweatpants, with a sports backpack, like he does whenever he goes to play football with his Argentine friends, all of them from La Boca, all of them waiters or cooks or barmen. At ten, Juan Pablo. He stopped on the sidewalk for a moment to double-check the contents of his coat and pants pockets. He took out his keys. His cell phone. A book. Another cell phone (another!). He went down Calle Zaragoza but this time instead of following him I watched him leave, I made sure he’d gone, I kept an eye on him till he had become a little doll two blocks down. I hurried over to the building, to the elevator, to the apartment, to Juan Pablo’s bedroom.
The bed made, the window open to the inner courtyard to air the room, books on the nightstand, surrounding the computer, pajamas folded on the bed, clothes in the closet, the laundry in a big garbage bag, condoms under a pile of underpants, hidden, as if his mother was going to come in to check the room, as if he was afraid I’d learn he was sleeping with another woman, because he hadn’t needed to wear them with me, because I’m on the pill. Or I was. Under the bed, a pair of slippers. Women’s slippers. Laia’s.
I turned the computer on. Juan Pablo hadn’t changed his password. I started opening files. Notes toward an essay on Albert Cohen and humor in the Holocaust. Transcribed quotes from Jung. Fifteen pages on the history of blow-up dolls and Felisberto Hernández. A thesis project on machista misogynist humor in twentieth-century Latin American literature (?!). It wasn’t a project, really, just the title and two introductory paragraphs. I went on looking through the folders, the stories I knew by heart, the fragments of abandoned novels, the essay on Gabriel Orozco with which Juan Pablo had not won the university competition, the thesis on Ibargüengoitia, articles on Ibargüengoitia, transcribed stories and novels by Ibargüengoitia, his articles, his interviews. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, maybe I just wanted to rule out the absurd theory that Juan Pablo was also writing a diary. If he was, I’m sure he’d do it on his computer, I’ve never seen him write by hand.
Of course, Juan Pablo wasn’t writing a diary, that minor literary form he held in such contempt, though he’d never said as much to me, so as not to offend me, not to get in the way of my academic interests. But he was writing something else. A novel. An autobiographical novel. He’d already completed six chapters, almost a hundred pages, much more than he’d managed to write on any of his previous attempts. I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, that’s what the novel was called. Is called. I don’t expect anyone to believe me. I emailed myself the document, turned off the computer, quit the room, the apartment, the building, without anybody seeing me. I ran off in no particular direction, down Calle Pàdua. On Calle Balmes I found a call shop and printed out the manuscript.
I called Juan Pablo, still trembling, out of fear and also from the adrenalin which my organism, so used to nothing ever happening, doesn’t know how to process. His cell was off. I went on calling him, always with the same result.
In the afternoon I picked Alejandra up and took her straight to Julio Verne. I told her it was going to rain (there wasn’t a single cloud, but the girl didn’t so much as glance up at the sky). She contented herself with my promise to do something fun with her hair.
There was nobody in the apartment but Cristian, who was getting ready to head out to work. I made up some story about urgently needing to talk to Juan Pablo because I couldn’t find an important document and needed to know if I’d left it with his things. He said he hadn’t seen him, that when he’d arrived, about one, he had already gone out and he hadn’t come back since. I started putting Alejandra’s hair in little plaits. It turned eight, eight-fifteen, Facundo arrived but no sign of Juan Pablo. As if that wasn’t enough, Facundo yelled at me.
‘What are you doing, shithead?’ he said, when he saw Alejandra’s hair. ‘If her mother finds out she’ll kill me, the shithead thinks makeup and hairdressing are impositions by the patriarchy. I got enough trouble already with the shithead blaming me for the fact Ále likes drawing princesses.’
On my way back home I stopped at a call shop and at a public phone to call Juan Pablo. His cell was still off.
I arrived at the apartment to find the last thing I needed: a party. And worse still, a Brazilian party. There were six or seven Brazilians, besides Andreia and Paulo, plus Gabriele, in camouflage. Andreia scooped me up as I walked through the door, she put a glass of beer in my hand, introduced me to her friends and tried teaching me a few little samba steps. All embellished with that tooth-filled smile. I felt so clumsy, so overwhelmed, so out of place, that the glass slipped out of my hand. I apologized and went into my room. Then Gabriele came knocking at the door: Hey, princess, he said, you could at least have cleaned it up.
All morning going to the call shop to phone Juan Pablo. The cell phone off. Noon I called the landline in the apartment, Cristian answered. He said Juan Pablo wasn’t in and he hadn’t spent the night there. I got over the shame and asked him if he thought he was with Laia. He said he didn’t know, but it tended to be Laia who came to sleep at the apartment, occasionally, only very occasionally, he said, as if they really didn’t sleep together very much or as if he felt sorry for me. I went back to the apartment to get Laia’s number. Laia the Mossos d’Esquadra officer, of course, not Laia Juan Pablo’s girlfriend. Girlfriend or, well, whatever she was.
At five I fetched Alejandra and took her to a different playground from the one I’m meant to, the one Laia said when I called her to ask for help. This playground was right next to the Ring, beside some drainage works, this city does love being gutted. Alejandra hasn’t stopped complaining, though not about the noise, but about the fact I’m not taking her to the usual square, the one we go to every day, she said, where her schoolmates go. Fortunately there was a sandbox and Alejandra set about scratching around and transporting sand over to the slide together with a smaller boy she used as a little laborer.
Laia arrived at the promised time, five-fifteen, in plain clothes. She had told me that today was her ‘free day’, that she wasn’t on duty, but that if I said it was urgent and confidential (that’s what I’d said) it was no problem for us to meet. Better this way: seen from outside it looked like just a regular everyday meeting between a couple of friends. Of course, Laia’s presence, which is so striking, she had her red mane loose and her hair really is beautiful, wouldn’t go unnoticed by anyone who knew her.
When I greeted her, she gave me a pair of kisses and squeezed my forearms, a greeting between friends, indeed, and I told her she looked amazing, and she answered that later she’d be going to see a movie with her girlfriend. She gave a happy laugh, as though being a lesbian was very amusing or as if she thought it was funny to be telling me.
We sat down on a bench beside the sandbox, from where I could keep an eye on Alejandra’s activities, and I started reading her a few excerpts from Juan Pablo’s novel, the passages I’d underlined, the ones that contained information that had disturbed me and which had led me to believe something had happened to Juan Pablo. (I’d removed a number of pages in which Juan Pablo had, indirectly, confessed to committing a murder. I had left those pages hidden in my room. Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing about that here.) The noise gave us a fair amount of freedom to talk without anybody bothering us.
Laia listened very carefully, interrupting from time to time so I could pass her the pages to reread some part or to read beyond whatever I’d underlined. She wanted to know how I’d gotten hold of the manuscript and I got tangled up in a meaningless explanation to avoid confessing, as if I had to protect my sources, when in reality I was just too ashamed to tell her what I’d done.
‘So listen,’ she said, after a lot of thought, ‘man, don’t get offended, but I think you’re tripping, this looks like a novel.’
I told her it was a novel, an autobiographical novel, that even though it was a text that used the mechanisms of fiction, everything it described was truthful, everything had truly happened.
‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘You weren’t there when they allegedly killed your boyfriend’s cousin, sorry, your ex-boyfriend’s cousin, and he didn’t tell you anything about it, or did he?’
‘But from that point Juan Pablo started acting real weird,’ I said, ‘I do know that, and he did try to stop me coming to Barcelona, like it says in the novel, he dumped me, then he changed his mind, though now I know he didn’t change his mind, he was obeying orders.’
‘Man,’ she said, ‘you’ve got to admit, the idea some criminal organization ordered him to get back together with you is kind of ridiculous.’
‘Because that was part of a plan,’ I said. ‘Everything he says in here that has anything to do with me is true. Other things I witnessed, too. I saw Juan Pablo get into a black Mercedes-Benz, without plates, on Plaza Lesseps. And I saw him leave, yesterday, apparently to get some acupuncture done, and he hasn’t been back since.’
‘Were you following him?’ she asked.
‘It was a coincidence,’ I said.
‘Well, actually two coincidences, right?’ she said, and she was about to say something else, but stopped herself.
I got up to tell Alejandro not to put sand in the little boy’s pants, which is what she was doing while the poor innocent’s mother wasn’t paying attention. I returned to the bench, where Laia was still looking over the manuscript.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ I said. ‘I don’t blame you, I don’t expect you to believe me, all I’m asking is for you to help me investigate it.’
‘Oh man, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it’s too twisted, too implausible. Besides, there’s nothing in here that’s any use. Who would we investigate? The “lawyer”? This “Chucky” guy? Or “The Chinaman”?’ she said, looking through the pages for the blue-ink circles I’d used to mark the characters. ‘The “guy who had come to meet me at Plaza Lesseps”? The “big cheese”? Ahmed? Man, these Pakistanis are all called Ahmed, it’s like a Catalan being called Jordi. There aren’t any people here, man, there are only characters.’
‘I’m there,’ I said, ‘I exist, though to tell the truth, Juan Pablo doesn’t talk about me much, I’m like a supporting character in the novel. Laia’s there, I know her, I met her, I’ve been with her, more than I’d have liked. Her father Oriol Carbonell’s there, you know him?’
‘Of course I know him, everyone knows him, he’s a big shot, he’s a public figure,’ she said, in a tone that emphasized the word ‘public’.
‘And the bit about Jimmy’s also there,’ I went on, ‘the Italian, Giuseppe, you met him too. To tell the truth, I decided to call you when I realized I’m not sure I can trust him either.’
‘So why do you trust me, if you’re so paranoid?’
‘Because you were kind to me,’ I said. ‘You were concerned for me. You inspired confidence. You still do.’
‘Man, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘to be totally honest, it looks like what we’ve got here is a mixture of truths and lies. I don’t know much about literature, or the theory about literature, but I’d have thought that’s how you make novels, isn’t it? Don’t authors use their own lives and experiences to transform into fiction? As far as I know, that’s what novels are: fiction. You can’t expect me to believe Juan Pablo just because he says it’s all true. You don’t think if he wanted to leave a record he would have written a diary? Or letters to a friend? And anyway, to me the key to the whole thing is the way the pages are written. I don’t believe that if Juan Pablo was so worried, if he feared for his life, he’d be writing like this, like with style, I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. Sometimes he even tries to be amusing. And with this whole shtick he has about humor and laughter.’
‘You don’t know the people I know,’ I said, ‘literature’s an illness for these people. I get what you mean about style, it’s the only way Juan Pablo ever writes, it comes out naturally for him because it’s the same style he’s used in the past in various short stories, in various novels he gave up on without finishing. He’s internalized it so much he no longer even notices. He used to tell me sometimes that he’d written something different and it turned out it was exactly the same as everything he’d written before. He’s always written with the same narrator, the same tone, the same tricks, have you noticed the way his protagonist always uses “so like” all the time? Those filler words are a bad habit all us Mexicans have, when we don’t know what to say or when we want to buy some time to see what we can come up with we start saying “so like, so like” over and over like imbeciles. Juan Pablo thought it would be funny to put it in his dialogue, he’d already started using it in another novel he was writing last year.’
‘Another autobiographical novel?’
‘Yes, but he couldn’t carry on with it because nothing happened to him, his life wasn’t enough for a novel, we had a kind of boring life in Mexico, kind of happy, kind of dumb. We read, we studied, we tried to write, we had a writing workshop, a reading group, we did translations for fun.’
The mother of Alejandra’s little slave-boy finally noticed what the kid was doing to her son. I had to get up to apologize, to scold Alejandra, threaten her with punishment, help the mother get the sand out of her little boy’s underpants. I went back to the bench, where Laia was waiting for me with a pitying expression, but a misplaced pity: she didn’t feel pity because she believed Juan Pablo had disappeared and I was in danger, she felt pity for what we’d lost by moving to Barcelona, that insipid life we’d lived in Xalapa.
‘You’ve got to help me,’ I said, trying to take advantage of her condescension. ‘Please, I’ve got this feeling something bad’s happened to Juan Pablo.’
She shook the sheaf of pages and straightened them out, before handing them back to me. She looked me in the eye to try to work out how scared I was.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘to be totally honest,’ she said, repeating the same polite expression, ‘to be totally honest I think Juan Pablo’s off someplace with his girlfriend and when he shows up you’re going to feel like shit. It’s not really for me to say, but honestly, girl, I think you should get over him. Enjoy the city for the rest of the time you’ve got and go back to your country and start a new life.’
‘Why don’t we call Laia?’ I said. ‘You can get her number, right?’
She hesitated a moment.
‘It’s only going to cause you more pain,’ she said.
‘I need to know Juan Pablo’s OK,’ I said.
She hesitated again.
‘Wait,’ she said, and she moved away to make a phone call.
She returned two or three minutes later.
‘I had to explain a bit more than I would have liked,’ she said.
She dialed the number on her cell.
‘Here,’ she said, handing me the phone. ‘You call.’
I waited for Laia to answer.
‘Hello?’ said Laia.
I was struck momentarily dumb.
‘Hello?’ she said again. ‘Who’s this?’ she said, in Catalan.
I explained who I was and without giving her a chance to react I said Juan Pablo’s mother had called me to say they hadn’t been able to track him down since yesterday. That they’d been calling him but his cell phone was off. That his mom had called the landline of his apartment and one of the Argentinians had told her Juan Pablo hadn’t come home to sleep. That they were very worried.
‘Oh Jeez,’ said Laia, without the -us, she didn’t say Jesus, only Jeez.
‘Is he with you?’ I asked.
‘We were meant to meet up last night,’ she said, ‘I sent him a message to arrange to meet, but he didn’t answer. And it’s true, his phone was turned off.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’ I asked, like the dialogue in a movie, a police interrogation in a crime novel.
‘I saw him briefly on Monday morning at the university,’ she said, ‘we got a coffee together. Tuesday I didn’t see him, but I did talk to him and we exchanged messages.’
I thanked her and I was about to hang up. She stopped me.
‘Hey, listen,’ she said, in Catalan. ‘Could you tell me if you find him?’ she asked, switching back to Spanish now. ‘I’ll try and find him too. Is this your cell number?’
I was about to say no, that I didn’t have a cell phone, that I couldn’t afford a cell phone, but I realized just in time that if I told her I didn’t have a cell phone I wouldn’t be able to explain how Juan Pablo’s mother had apparently tracked me down.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘call this number anytime.’
I was about to hang up again, and again she stopped me.
‘Hey, listen,’ she said, in Catalan. ‘How’d you get my number?’
I hesitated a fraction of a second.
‘You gave it to me,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
I hung up. I gave the phone to Laia, the other Laia, along with an explanation.
‘I don’t know, man, I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘You got to understand that for someone to be considered a missing person they need to have disappeared for forty-eight hours.’
I took out a folded sheet of paper I’d been keeping separately in one of my coat pockets, I unfolded it and handed it over.
‘Look at this,’ I said.
The underlined passage began: ‘Riquer called me up and said: Come to my office first thing tomorrow morning. We agreed to meet at eight at his office on the Paseo de San Juan. When I arrived, I found him on his own: it wasn’t the station of the Mossos d’Esquadra, it was the off-ice where they finish off (sic) private matters, he explained.’
‘Jesus fuck,’ said Laia, turning pale.
‘Is your partner trustworthy?’ I asked her. ‘The officer who was with you when you came to pick up Jimmy?’
‘That’s my boss,’ she said. ‘Oh shit. Oh shit.’
‘There’s more,’ I said.
I took Lorenzo’s letter out of my other coat pocket.
‘This is Juan Pablo’s cousin. This is where it all started. When I received this, I started to get suspicious and that’s why I went to check things out. Actually, now I think about it, the whole thing’s your fault, you’re the one who told me to go to the consulate and that’s where they gave me the letter.’
She unfolded the sheets of paper and started to read.
‘There’s not a lot of detail,’ I said. ‘Almost nothing, really. But I didn’t even know him. What’s weird is that he wrote to me at all. Do you have any idea what it’s like getting a letter from a dead guy?’
Laia was still focused on her reading. She gave up after a couple of pages.
‘This guy was kind of retarded, right?’ she said.
‘That’s why I didn’t show it to you right away, because you’d think I was crackers.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Crackers, crazy.’
‘Oh, a wack job.’
She stared out into space for a moment, the space that was located precisely at the endless line of cars that were jammed up on the Ring, it was almost 6 p.m., home-time for the schools, the end of the working day. She shifted out of her immobility to pull her cell phone out of her pocket.
‘Cari,’ she said into the phone, having dialed and waited for the other person to pick up. ‘Something’s come up, I’m so so sorry. Can we leave it for another day? Yeah, I know. I’ll make it up to you, OK? I promise.’
She put the phone back in her pocket and looked at me very seriously.
‘Oh man,’ she said, ‘if even half of what I’m imagining is true, this is dynamite. What are we talking about here? A conspiracy between Mexican narcos and the Italian Mafia to launder money in Cataluña? Using Oriol Carbonell? The party? And under the protection of the head of the Mossos d’Esquadra! Jesus, man, this is some heavy shit.’
‘You think they’re narcos?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, who else could it be, I’m just thinking aloud.’
‘So you think it’s true,’ I said.
‘There’s a talking dog…’
‘OK,’ I answered. ‘That bit’s definitely fiction.’
‘Or the Pakistani guy’s a bigger wack job than Bin Laden,’ she said. ‘Till what time do you have to look after Alejandra?’
‘Eight. Eight-thirty.’
‘Give me the girl’s address, I’ll pick you up there at eight-thirty. In the meantime I’m going to make some calls, and I’m taking the papers with me, I want to take a look at them more calmly.’
‘Guess,’ I said. ‘Number 2, Julio Verne, sound familiar?’
‘No shit! That’s how you got it?’
She got up to leave. I asked if she thought Juan Pablo was in danger.
‘I’d rather not confirm that,’ she said. ‘Or, yeah, that’s exactly what I want to confirm. I’d rather not hazard a guess, that’s what I meant, ah, I’ve gotten myself in such a tangle.’
‘You can also tell me you don’t believe me,’ I said, ‘that I’m being paranoid, you can go see a movie with your girlfriend and forget me. Are you sure you want to get involved in this?’
She put her hand on my shoulder, like last time, except now it didn’t feel like an insulting gesture of condescension.
‘Someone’s got to be the good guy in this novel,’ she said, ‘don’t you think?’
‘The good girl,’ I said.
‘The good girl,’ she repeated. ‘But the good girl’s not an idiot. Tonight you’re going to give me the missing pages, don’t think I haven’t noticed.’
She walked over to the edge of the sandbox and said goodbye to Alejandra.
‘Bye, Ále,’ she said, in Catalan. ‘You behave, OK? Don’t be a hooligan.’
‘Your hair’s frosted by the fire!’ Alejandra shouted back.
I saw the confusion on Laia’s face.
‘One of those things her mother says,’ I said, to reassure her.
I left Julio Verne at eight forty-five, fifteen minutes late, but Laia was still waiting for me, on the corner, leaning against the wall of the stationery store. She asked if I’d had any news from Juan Pablo and I said no, and that in fact Facundo and Cristian were alarmed now too, that they’d told me Juan Pablo had never stayed away so long before.
‘I’ve spent this whole time at Plaza del Sol,’ she said. ‘Looking for the Italian. If what Juan Pablo wrote in the novel is true, the Italian can lead us to the Chinaman and the Chinaman to Juan Pablo. But the Italian wasn’t there, they told me he hasn’t shown up at the square all day. He wasn’t at his home either, at least not the address we have on file for him.’
‘The squatter house in Plaza Lesseps?’
‘Right. I talked to a couple kids who insisted he doesn’t live there. They were so high I’m not sure they even knew who I was talking about. I asked a colleague of mine to help me track him down. We can’t just sit in the square and wait to see if he shows up.’
‘We’ve got to talk to Laia’s dad,’ I said.
‘Man, are you crazy?’ she answered at once, not giving me a chance to explain my reasoning. ‘If what Juan Pablo’s novel says is true,’ she said again, ‘if half of what’s there in the manuscript is correct, Laia’s father is in it up to his neck. All we’d achieve would be to put him on the alert and position ourselves right in his sights. They suspect you already, girl, we’ve got to be real careful. You don’t know this country you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in, these people are untouchable, I’d be out of this job for so much as knocking at his door without a court order.’
‘Well, what then?’ I asked.
‘There’s another thread we might start trying to pull,’ she said.
I knew what she was about to say, but I didn’t interrupt her, I didn’t want to disrupt her analysis, maybe she’d spotted some detail that had escaped me.
‘Laia,’ she said, just as I’d expected. She’d be able to identify the dog, her uncle used to ask her to look after it when he was traveling. ‘His name, Laia’s uncle’s, really is Pere Lleonart.’
She paused to see whether I said anything. I noticed the carefulness with which she hadn’t said ‘his name was’, and I realized this was what made me trust her, her precise politeness, not hypocritical or exaggerated, just right.
‘I already know what the pages you kept say,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t that hard to work it out.’
I said nothing.
‘Did they force him to do it?’ she asked, not specifying who or what.
I broke down. I started crying. Laia waited for me to calm down. She didn’t put her hand on my shoulder, she didn’t even touch me, she was clearly confused about how she should behave, and finally chose to remain still.
‘Come on, we’ll have to hurry,’ she said, when I’d stopped crying, while I blew my nose.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘To fetch Viridiana, it’s just the time for taking the dog out to pee before going to sleep. It’s a very narrow little thread, but we’ve got to start somewhere.’
‘And if we find the dog, are we planning on questioning her?’ I said, wiping my eyes.
She laughed to help me finish calming down.
‘And if she refuses to cooperate we can question whoever’s holding the leash,’ she said.
Getting myself back together, I shook my head to clear the daze into which the drama had plunged me.
‘Come,’ said Laia, ‘I’ve agreed to meet Laia.’
We’d been going up and down the Rambla del Raval when I spotted Laia standing next to the statue of an obese cat, Botero’s cat. In spite of the cold, it was Thursday and the Rambla was full of students who were going partying, Pakistanis selling beer, people out drinking and locals taking their dogs out for the last time.
‘That’s her,’ I said to the other Laia.
She was wearing a long overcoat, in bottle-green, buttoned up to her neck, denim pants and boots, her face washed clean without a speck of makeup. She was impatient, an impatience that predated this encounter, inherited, or genetic, as if being impatient was a personality trait and not a lapse in behavior. She interrupted the other Laia before she’d finished introducing herself and explaining that she was the Mossos d’Esquadra officer who’d called her to arrange a meeting.
‘Why aren’t you in uniform?’ asked Laia.
The other Laia explained that she had a free day and to head off her suspicions she showed her ID that confirmed that she was a Mossos officer.
‘And you work on your day off,’ said Laia.
The other Laia glanced over at me and answered that she was helping me look for Juan Pablo because we were friends.
‘I’ve spoken to my dad,’ said Laia, without looking at me. ‘My uncle isn’t missing, my father knows where he is, he didn’t want to tell me, but I pressured him and he finally told me.’
She paused, and ran her tongue over her crooked teeth. I hadn’t remembered she had reddish hair, or that it was cut so short, maybe she went to a beauty parlor before going to parties.
‘So where is he?’ said the other Laia.
‘In Sitges,’ said Laia. ‘My father still thinks I’m five years old and that he can’t tell me my uncle’s gay and that he’s shut away in an orgy.’
‘That’s a lie,’ I said, without even realizing it, but the other Laia grabbed hold of my forearm to shut me up before I said what I was thinking: that it was her fault, or her father’s, or both of theirs, that Juan Pablo hadn’t shown up and I had to put up with all this crap.
I kept quiet as she wanted, and she hesitated a moment, working out how far she could go, what it would or wouldn’t be a good idea to reveal.
‘Your father told you that because he’s also mixed up in it,’ she said.
‘And what the fuck are my father and uncle supposed to have to do with Juan Pablo?’ she asked, in Catalan.
‘Speak Spanish, please,’ said the other Laia, in Catalan.
Laia turned to face me for the first time. She made sure her expression conveyed no hidden motives, or hidden feelings.
‘You understand me, don’t you?’ she asked me, in Catalan.
I had understood her, but just to annoy her I said no. She repeated what she’d just said in Spanish. We both looked at the other Laia, who was taking the most minute care over her choice of words.
‘The link is Juan Pablo’s godfather,’ she said at last.
She paused, rhetorically, as Juan Pablo would put it, to allow Laia to remember.
‘Apparently,’ she said, then ‘allegedly’, she corrected herself, ‘allegedly’, she repeated, ‘Juan Pablo’s godfather, who isn’t really his godfather, made your father a business proposition and your uncle got in the way.’
‘A business proposition?’ said Laia. ‘What business proposition?’
‘Money laundering,’ said the other Laia. ‘He wanted to use your father’s political connections.’
‘Money laundering?’ said Laia. ‘You’re nuts! This guy was so totally charming, polite, cultured – we talked about Rosa Luxemburg, about Berlin, which he knew better than me even though I lived there for six months. He spoke Catalan, he’d done a master’s in Barcelona, it turned out my father had even taught him!’
‘Too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?’ said the other Laia.
‘You’re both crazy,’ said Laia again, in Catalan, but as she spoke these words she suddenly froze. ‘Oh fuck,’ she said, ‘Oh fuck.’
‘Don’t shou—’ was as much as the other Laia managed to say before Laia shouted:
‘Petanca!’
The dog came running over to Laia’s feet, dragging a blue and red leash behind her, or rather, a blue and scarlet leash. The guy walking her took off in the opposite direction, up the Rambla, and the other Laia raced after him. Halfway up the Rambla somebody dropped a green plastic bag. I went over to confirm what I knew would be inside: six red tins of beer, unchilled. I took them back with me to the Botero statue of the cat at whose feet the dog had started to pee.
‘Fucking hell, girl,’ said Laia, crying, ‘Jesus, you’ve got to fucking tell me what’s going on.’
She’d crouched down to pet the dog, running her hand over her head, her back, under her chin, whispering to her, in Catalan:
‘Where’s Uncle Pere, sweetie? Where’s el tiet?’
The other Laia hadn’t returned. We walked the dog up and down the Rambla, never straying too far from Botero’s cat. All the other dogs came over toward Petanca to try to mount her, but she and we didn’t let them.
‘How did you know the dog would be here?’ Laia asked me, with the effortful awkwardness with which one asks for a favor or admits a mistake.
I told her we’d been following a lead to track down Juan Pablo, that it was hard to explain, it would be better if Laia told her. She didn’t insist, she just accepted it, presumably concluding, as I did, that Laia’s mediation was essential if we were to remain level-headed.
We stopped in a store to buy kibble. We went on walking the dog, in silence. Then something truly unusual happened: I started to get turned on. It was probably a weird reaction to the stress, combined with the sad statistic that I hadn’t screwed anyone since Christmas and I hadn’t masturbated since the New Year. It also, and I’m not going to deny it, had to have something to do with Laia’s presence. I’d told myself I wasn’t going to think about what had happened, not to remember it, to allow it to disappear into the dark woods of memory, which wasn’t that complicated, since the effect of the pill meant I barely remembered it anyway. If I tried hard I could retrieve a few images, a few sensations, the general impression of a pleasure better suited to an erotic dream than to any real sexual relations. As Juan Pablo would have said: I’m sure you could explain it with Bataille. Finally the other Laia reappeared.
‘I lost him,’ she said, when she was back with us, still panting from the exertion.
‘He looked Pakistani,’ said Laia.
‘Did you notice he didn’t have a moustache?’ the other Laia said to me.
‘The dog’s not called Viridiana,’ I whispered, without Laia noticing.
‘Do you guys know that Pakistani?’ Laia asked us.
The other Laia ignored the question and squatted down to pet Petanca.
‘So cute,’ she said.
‘She’s on her period,’ said Laia.
‘Dogs don’t get periods,’ the two of us said in unison.
We went into the first place that allowed us in with Petanca, a kebab place on Calle Joaquín Costa. The TV was tuned to a channel showing music videos from India, from Pakistan, at incredibly high volume. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the music was playing over the usual racket you always get in the city’s restaurants and bars, that unbearable dull roar peppered with shrieks and peals of laughter. It was the perfect setting for us to go unnoticed. The waiter came to take our order and gave us a compliment that, oddly, I’d heard many times before in Mexico.
‘Well, here’s a three-of-a-kind that’s worth more than a poker of aces,’ he said.
‘There are four of us,’ said the Laia from the Mossos d’Esquadra, gesturing toward the dog.
‘Didn’t they teach you what harassment is in Pakistan?’ said the other Laia.
‘Take it easy, man,’ said the waiter, ‘I’m from Bangladesh, in Bangladesh we like beautiful women like you, in Pakistan they’re all fags.’
I ordered some food before Laia had a chance to start telling the poor waiter about Judith Butler. I was starving, not having noticed that the only thing I’d eaten since breakfast had been half of Alejandra’s afternoon snack. The dog sprawled under the table and I saw she’d left a smear of blood on the white mosaic.
Laia’s natural impatience was a terrible combination with fear and a sense of urgency. She behaved rudely, hurried and hysterical, demanding explanations as though she was the victim of all this, the only victim.
‘Listen, princess,’ the other Laia interrupted her, ‘you got to calm down. And you too,’ she said to me, totally unjustified.
As for me, the reason I was struggling to control myself at that moment was entirely down to my lack of energy, I’d used up the last of my strength repressing the episode of involuntary arousal and I felt I was completely empty of adrenaline and about to faint.
‘If we all become hysterical we’re going to get nowhere,’ she added, as a threat.
Then she started to tell Laia one possible version of what we knew up till that point. She did it with pauses, thoughtfully, as if instead of telling the story she too was hearing it for the first time, as if she was arranging the plot as she went along, repeating names to avoid confusion, avoiding ellipses, choosing the same words Juan Pablo had used in his novel and replacing the murder of her uncle with a hypothetical, unconfirmed, kidnapping.
‘Man, what the hell are you saying?’ said Laia when the other Laia had finished giving a synopsis of the novel, shifting around in her chair as if something were pricking her butt. ‘Do you realize what you’re saying? Can you hear what you’re saying? Can you hear what it sounds like? Man, you’ve gone totally batshit.’
‘And how do you explain about the dog?’ the other Laia asked her. ‘We knew the guy who’d kept the dog, Ahmed, usually walked her on the Rambla del Raval.’
‘He could be a friend of my uncle’s who asked him to look after her,’ said Laia, ‘we didn’t give him a chance to explain, you threw yourself at him.’
‘And he just started running away just because?’ said the other Laia.
‘Probably he hasn’t got any papers,’ said Laia, ‘or out of habit, didn’t you see how he ran away? The guy’s gay, he’s probably used to running away to avoid getting beaten up, you guys have no idea about the discrimination these poor people suffer in their countries.’
‘We also know,’ I said, to stop Laia continuing to assemble a coherent speech that might ultimately allow her to escape us (there’s no worse enemy to truth than narrative logic) – ‘we also know’, I repeated, ‘that you’ve been deceiving Juan Pablo, that your supposed conversion to heterosexuality is all just part of your doctoral thesis, you’re doing this whole thing as if it was some kind of performance piece.’
I’m sure it must have seemed I was motivated by jealousy, but the truth is that I’d been thinking we needed to give Laia information for her to corroborate. Laia made as if to stand up, she flinched backward and tugged on the dog’s leash, but a dish of chickpea croquettes and the arm of the Bangladeshi waiter putting it down in front of her made this impossible.
‘As if it were some kind of performance piece?’ she said. ‘Man, what the fuck are you talking about?’
‘That’s what a friend of yours told Juan Pablo,’ I said. ‘A very very very good friend of yours. Some girl called Mireia,’ I said, and I took a bite of the kebab I’d just been served.
‘How do you know?’
I looked to the other Laia for help, I’d asked her not to say anything about the manuscript and she’d said we had to tell her.
‘He told me,’ I lied, before Laia beat me to it.
‘To hell with Mireia,’ said Laia. ‘To hell with all my bitch friends. Mireia’s jealous, man, Mireia can’t accept I dumped her. Hey, just like you, you’re both capable of making up any ridiculous bullshit just so long as you don’t have to deal with reality.’
‘You met Juan Pablo’s cousin who was murdered,’ said the other Laia, who’d understood the point of my strategy. ‘You met him on the Caribbean coast, that’s where it all started.’
She put her fork loaded with salad into her mouth, enjoying the effect of her words, or so that her words could have their effect. I kept my kebab suspended in front of my mouth, my lips smeared with yogurt sauce, because this was a detail I’d missed. The expression on Laia’s face now told us she really didn’t understand a thing. She fixed her olive eyes on the other Laia so she would go on.
‘In Cancún. A guy who recommended places for you to visit, you and your girlfriend. You gave him your details in case he ever came to Barcelona.’
Laia opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it, her folded-back upper lip leaving her teeth exposed. She was finally accepting that we were telling the truth, or at least that there was some truth in all this, and that, the truth, had the effect of stripping away her mask of arrogance, leaving her totally vulnerable. Then I remembered something: I had sucked this girl’s teeth. The sensation hit me all at once in my groin, running my tongue over her four upper incisors, slightly raised above the arch of the molars and canines.
‘Call Juan Pablo’s apartment,’ the other Laia said, yanking me out of my daze and handing me her cell phone. ‘Say we’ll be there in half an hour. We’ve got to search Juan Pablo’s room.’
I told her I’d done that already and I hadn’t found anything.
‘We’ve got to look again,’ she said, ‘don’t take it the wrong way, but you might not have looked properly. And you should eat,’ she added, as though giving us an order, ‘with all this emotion you’re going to crash.’
‘Listen, shithead,’ said Facundo’s voice in the intercom, ‘what’s this about Alejandra having been playing in the sandbox if there isn’t a sandbox in the Plaza de la Revolución?’
‘Can we come up?’ I asked.
‘Who else is there with you?’ he said.
‘Laia,’ I answered, ‘and another friend.’
‘Laia?’ he said, ‘and what are you all going to do, another threesome?’
‘Will you open up?’ I said, touching the key in my coat pocket that I could be using to open the door myself.
We heard the electric buzz that opened the door, I gave it a push and we crossed the entrance hall toward the elevator. Laia said she’d take the stairs, that the dog was terrified of elevators. The three of us looked at the dog, who really had sat down two meters away from the elevator and was recoiling. The other Laia said she’d go with her, that it would do her good to take the stairs, that climbing stairs is good for logic, that it’s the sort of exercise that helps you think. I guess she was afraid Laia would have a change of heart on the way and decide to go home. I went into the elevator and waited on the landing of the sixth floor, I didn’t feel I had the energy to put up with Facundo’s coked-up verbal diarrhea on my own.
The three of them arrived breathing totally calmly, with no sign of having made any effort, I was envious of the lung capacity they demonstrated, even in circumstances like these. Once, right near the start of my time living there, the elevator had been undergoing maintenance for a day and when I’d taken the stairs I’d had to sit down for a bit on the fourth floor so as to recover and then make it up to the sixth.
Facundo opened the door and immediately resumed the rant from the intercom.
‘Which park did you take Ále to today, shithead?’
I said it was the one round the back of the building, on the Ring. The two Laias tried to say something, I’m guessing good evening, hello, but Facundo didn’t stop.
‘On the Ring? Are you crazy? There’s a hell of a wind blowing. And you let her play in the sand?’
I kept quiet.
‘Stop screwing around, Vale,’ he said, ‘don’t you know the sand’s freezing? Your little brain’s not up to it? The kid’s got a fever, shithead, and tomorrow I got to go see a client in Manresa. If Ále can’t go to school, you’re the one looking after her. And don’t think for a second I’m going to pay you, it’s your responsibility, for being a shithead, shithead.’
‘Man,’ Laia broke in, ‘why’d you let him talk to you like that?’
And then she said to Facundo:
‘Could you not be such a dick, shithead?’
‘Jesus, I’ve had it up to here with all these women,’ said Facundo, ‘they wanted their fucking women’s lib just so they could act irresponsible, Alejandra’s shithead mother just clears off and abandons me with the girl, and I can’t do everything.’
‘Is she sleeping?’ I asked, before the two Laias could join forces to kill him.
‘I gave her Apiretal ten minutes ago,’ he said, ‘she seems to have calmed down a bit.’
‘I’ll go look in on her,’ I said.
‘Go,’ he said, ‘and keep an eye on her to see if she wakes up. I’ll take a shower meantime.’
‘I’m going through to Juan Pablo’s room, OK?’ said the Laia from the Mossos d’Esquadra.
The two Laias headed for Juan Pablo’s bedroom and I went into Facundo’s, where Alejandra was sleeping uneasily in her cot. I walked around Facundo’s bed and touched her forehead: she was still burning. In her dreams, in the middle of a nightmare, the girl was delirious.
I looked into Juan Pablo’s room: the two Laias had lifted up the mattress and were rummaging around inside his socks. I saw that Laia had put her slippers on the table, on top of a pile of books. I helped them look. We didn’t find anything. We went into the living room, with one of the Laias carrying her slippers, the other with Juan Pablo’s laptop, which she said she was going to take with her to search.
‘I’d better go,’ said the Laia with the laptop, looking at her wristwatch, it was twelve-thirty. ‘I’ve got a really early start tomorrow,’ she added.
‘So now what?’ I said.
‘One of you should stay here,’ she said to us both. And then to me:
‘If I manage to track down the Italian, I’ll let you know, buy yourself a cell phone first thing tomorrow and call me so I’ve got the number.’
I said yes without telling her I didn’t have any money, but something in my attitude gave me away.
‘Here,’ she said, giving me a fifty-euro note. ‘A prepaid cell phone.’
She said goodbye to us both with a pair of kisses apiece.
‘Keep your spirits up,’ she said, from the door. ‘I’ll talk to some of my colleagues tomorrow and we’ll find him, just see if we don’t.’
She crouched down to say another goodbye to the dog, who had approached the door, thinking that the other Laia was also leaving, but the other Laia shut the door, from the inside, and said:
‘I think we should talk.’
I walked back to the living room and Laia and the dog followed me. Facundo appeared with a towel tied around his waist, bare-chested, droplets of water trickling from his hair down his neck.
‘Has the redhead gone?’ he asked. ‘So stunning, that redhead, Jesus, that’s a nice piece of ass. But there’s still enough to work with, how’s about a threesome?’
‘Seriously, man, you’re such a moron,’ said Laia.
‘That was a joke, Laia,’ Facundo replied, ‘no sense of humor, these Catalans are so serious. Don’t worry, girls, you’ll see that shithead Juan Pablo will be back any moment, couldn’t he have gone to Tarragona? Didn’t he have a friend in Tarragona? Iván, I think his name was, he came here to the apartment one time.’
‘He’s not with him,’ said Laia, ‘I’ve called the other doctoral students already.’
I told Facundo I wanted to stay to sleep there, that I was going to stay, that someone had to be in the apartment in case Juan Pablo came back.
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘Alejandra’s still got a fever, she won’t be able to go to school tomorrow, I’ll stay with her.’
He said goodbye and headed for his room but came straight back.
‘Vale, what are those stains in the hallway, shithead?’
I went with him to have a look.
‘It was the dog,’ I said, once I’d confirmed what I had suspected.
‘Is the dog on her period?’ he said.
‘Dogs don’t have periods,’ I said, ‘it’s called proestrus, the dog’s going into heat.’
‘All the same to me,’ he said, ‘you’re cleaning it up. And make sure the dog doesn’t lie on the rug.’
I went back to the living room and saw Petanca sprawled on the rug under the center table. Laia had sat down on the sofa. I threw myself down next to her.
‘You really believe I’m deceiving him?’ she asked.
I said I didn’t know, that to tell the truth, I didn’t know anything anymore, and I closed my eyes and took in the first calm moment of the day. If Laia hadn’t gone on jabbering away I’d have fallen asleep. She justified herself, arguing that she’d done it out of curiosity, saying Juan Pablo had been really insistent, that now she thought about it that insistence could actually be suspicious, but there’s no way she could have suspected earlier, the idea that somebody wanted to pick her up because they’d been coerced by a criminal organization was frankly ludicrous. I allowed myself to be distracted thinking about the precision of that verb, coerced, which I’d never used in regular conversation, nor ever heard anybody else use, and I reflected on the way Spaniards use language, how that manner that so often offended me and which I felt was packed full of aggressions was based on an idea of precision that we Mexicans, and maybe Latin Americans in general, just don’t know how to handle. When I returned from my metalinguistic reverie to Laia’s chatter, she was accusing her friends of bearing part of the blame, for having judged her so unfairly, for having concluded that her behavior was a reaction to the pressure from her family, her father in particular. She said they acted so sophisticated but deep down they were total fucking behaviorists and that they were so annoying that she’d ended up giving Juan Pablo a chance.
‘Don’t I have a right to be curious?’ she asked me, though it was a rhetorical question, as Juan Pablo would put it. ‘You have no idea what a pain in the ass it is, man,’ she went on, ‘friendship ends up turning into this kind of repressive militancy, y’know? People don’t want you to change, people just can’t accept you turning into a different person from the one they imagined, even my uncle, the only person who protected me, turned against me, suddenly turned into this kind of commissar enforcer of homoerotic Stalinism.’
She fell silent a moment.
‘Do you know what happened to my uncle?’ she asked.
Without opening my eyes, I shook my head, side to side, to answer no. She returned to her subject of the difficulty of people not accepting her as she was, how hard it is to resist when everyone wants you to fulfill their expectations, how tired she was of all her acquaintances and relations and lovers, of friendship, professionals, they operated under the dialectics of conflict, and all of a sudden, for no particular reason, or without my understanding what the reason was, she started to talk about her teeth. I opened my eyes wide in shock.
‘Yeah, man, don’t pretend,’ she said when she noticed my surprise, ‘everyone says I should sort out my teeth, nobody understands why I didn’t sort them out when it was the right time, in my adolescence, but I didn’t want braces because they bothered me, it wasn’t just the pain or the discomfort, but the very idea of having all that in my mouth, the wires and the plastic bands, making my breath rotten, I was a pretty badly behaved little girl, and my parents wanted to make me do it, they insisted so much that I turned it into a fetish for my rebellion, I built my whole identity around that rebellion. If that makes sense?’
‘I guess,’ I said, looking at her teeth, now she’d given me the perfect pretext to look at them blatantly.
I closed my eyes again to pull myself together. We stayed silent a little while, I could almost feel the heat of Laia’s body on the sofa, I opened my left eye and saw she was looking at her cell phone. From that rug came the guttural sounds that Petanca made in her dreams, a kind of snoring. All we needed now was for the dog to have sleep apnea. Laia laughed.
‘What’s up?’ I asked, thinking she had read something on her cell phone.
‘The dog,’ she said, ‘my uncle says she talks.’
I opened my eyes, gave a stretch then leaned in closer to the dog to listen.
‘That is what it sounds like,’ I said, ‘what do you figure she’s saying?’
‘Aydonbilivit,’ said Laia.
‘What?’ I said.
‘That’s what my uncle says the dog’s always saying, listen: Aydonbilivit. Ay-don-bili-vit. Do you get it?’
I looked at her like she was crazy.
‘I’m joking, man,’ she said ‘It’s a line my uncle always used to say to me and my sisters when we were little and we told him about some prank of ours: I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it, that’s what my uncle used to say when he was acting surprised, to make our exploits seem bigger. My uncle has always been so affectionate with us.’
‘How many sisters do you have?’
‘Four.’
‘Four? I thought you had more.’
‘More? How many?’
‘I don’t know, like eleven. Weren’t your parents Opus Dei?’
‘Yeah, but my mother’s polycystic. Luckily.’
I started thinking about the inconsistencies in Juan Pablo’s novel that I’d discovered so far, how the dog’s name was different, what the Pakistani looked like, how many sisters Laia had, those were three details that revealed that there was some novelistic intent to those pages, that Juan Pablo was acting with an awareness of the mechanisms of auto-fiction. The fact that Laia had eleven sisters in the novel, for example, seemed like a comic element to be exploited, very much in the style of the comedies of intrigue Juan Pablo liked so much, something he hadn’t yet had the time to develop. Identifying the fictional side of the manuscript had the effect of calming me down, as if the fact of the novel being unfinished, left halfway, gave me some kind of guarantee that the author would be coming back to finish it. The dog woke up, disturbed by her own snoring.
‘I better go,’ said Laia.
‘What are you going to tell your folks?’ I asked her. ‘About the dog, I mean, how are you going to explain that you found her?’
‘They’re the ones who’re going to have to explain things to me,’ she answered.
We got up and it looked like we were going to hug, but we stayed apart.
‘Try to get some rest,’ she said. ‘Call me tomorrow so I’ve got your number and we can be in touch. I’ll tell you what my dad said.’
‘Wait,’ I said, remembering that her number was in the other Laia’s cell phone.
I went over to the coat stand where I’d hung my handbag and took out my notebook.
‘Write your number in here,’ I said.
I opened the notebook and found an empty page, under Laia’s careful gaze.
‘Is that a diary?’
‘In theory,’ I said, ‘though actually it’s got so much plot it’s started looking more like a novel.’
She leaned on the dining-room table to jot down her number.
‘Let’s hope it has a happy ending,’ she said.
‘It will,’ I replied. ‘You’ll see.’