I’m sure there can’t be anything phonier than a woman who’s spent the last few years studying diaries, memoirs, autobiographies and all kinds of private writings, suddenly starting to write a diary herself. Especially if her interest up until this point has been academic rather than creative. But I don’t want to make literature, I’m sure of that. Two certainties in the first paragraph, that’s not bad. Though they are, as always, only theoretical certainties.
Private writing is so deceitful that I’m already justifying myself as though these pages might one day be read by someone. Or worse, as though they were going to be published. If the impulse that made me buy this notebook were genuine I’d just get on and write about something, directly, no preamble. How it didn’t rain today. How I’m on page 92 of The Savage Detectives. A transcript of the ludicrous conversation I had this morning at the stationer’s (so much trouble just to buy a pen, the pen I’m writing with now and which here in Spain they call a ‘bolígrafo’). A record of the fact that today I ate a tangerine and two apples. That a week has passed since I arrived in Barcelona and I still haven’t spoken to Juan Pablo and he hasn’t made enough of an effort for me to respond. And after these two or three banalities, I would now, as at the start of any confession, offer an emphatic assurance that everything I’m going to write will be the truth. All of it. Rousseau-style. The promise of veracity. The autobiographical pact. As if anybody was going to believe me, anyway. I don’t expect anyone to believe me.
Fine, so I’ve written two lies. I didn’t eat a tangerine. Or two apples. It was a manner of speaking, I could just as easily have said I’d eaten a pear. Or a slice of pineapple. It was actually a bit of plagiarism, taken from the diaries of Sylvia Plath, who was a great eater of tangerines. I had spaghetti with tomato sauce for lunch. I had spaghetti with tomato sauce for dinner. Just like yesterday and the day before yesterday and also tomorrow, I’m guessing. Juan Pablo made chicken and salad for dinner. He offered me some. I said no and lay down with Bolaño in the bedroom as soon as I was done stuffing myself with the spaghetti standing in the kitchen next to the microwave. I could make out Juan Pablo’s chatter with the two Argentinians in the living room, they were having dinner with the TV on, watching a football game (I should write somewhere that we live in an apartment with two Argentinians, Facundo and Cristian, both from Buenos Aires, both from the La Boca neighborhood).
When Juan Pablo came back to the bedroom he also lay down and started reading. I don’t know what he was reading: I turned my back on him. I wanted to hit him over the head with my hefty Bolaño tome (I know it’s only the pocket paperback, but I bet if I got enough momentum behind it I could give him a decent bruise). We carried on reading. Since nobody said anything, not even good night, the lamp stayed on until morning.
11 a.m. Juan Pablo went off to university. I went out to take a wander around the neighborhood, on a sort of reconnaissance mission. Out the back of the building there’s a very wide highway (the Ring, they call it), incredibly noisy, one of those monstrous urban borders. In front there is a tangle of little streets. The Ring that’s always crammed with cars, plus the slope of the city, always pushes me downward (I’ve not yet crossed the highway to see what’s further up).
The only people in the neighborhood around this time of day are old people. All very stiff. Wearing overcoats that are too thick for the cold (it isn’t very) and pulling little carts into which they put the vegetables, bread, meat or wine they buy. The oldest of them don’t pull anything: they get pushed. They travel in wheelchairs pushed by Latin American women. Their faces make me feel at home, sometimes. Until they speak and I hear those accents so different from mine (these women are Peruvian, Ecuadorian or Bolivian, mostly). On Calle Pàdua there’s a butcher’s and a baker’s that look like designer boutiques. A charcuterie where a hundred grams of jamón serrano costs what I spend on three days of spaghetti and tomato sauce.
I think I’ve figured out why it is that Juan Pablo made up his mind to live in this neighborhood, even though there were cheaper options. Two hundred and fifty euro is insane, a stupid extravagance. I’ve seen advertisements for even a hundred and fifty, or one eighty, and most of them are around two hundred. Of course, that was for places in Paralelo, or in El Raval, but the location wasn’t an issue, either way Juan Pablo still has to take the train to go to his university in Bellaterra. Unless… Unless what Juan Pablo wanted was to avoid the streets filled with Moroccans and Ecuadoreans, with Dominican mulattos and women in veils. Those halal butchers and Afro hairdressers. What Juan Pablo wanted was to live in a neighborhood of respectable people. He’s brought all his family’s prejudices over with him, packed up in his suitcase. If you ask me, from what I see on the streets and the way other people look at me, those stares that pierce me like thorns, it seems to me we’ve placed ourselves bang in the middle of a neighborhood of one-time Francoists.
Tonight I ran down to the supermarket before it closed to restock on spaghetti and tomato sauce. I was squatting in front of the shelf of canned food when a woman asked me for two jars of asparagus. I held them out to her, stretching out my arm but not getting up, and she signaled with her eyes that I was to put them into her shopping cart. Then she told me to go with her to get the milk, as she couldn’t carry the containers because they were too heavy. I gave her a puzzled look. Only then did she notice what I was wearing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you worked in the store.’
With her right hand she made a gesture encompassing her face to indicate, metaphorically, my features and the color of my skin, to explain how she’d made a mistake on account of my appearance.
‘But you’re very pretty,’ she said.
I shouldn’t pay any mind to that, but.
I shouldn’t write about this, but.
But.
But.
It was beautiful out today, not one cloud in the sky and you could hardly feel the cold. I went down to the street to find myself some sun, like a cat. Or like a little old granny: just the other side of the Ring I found a very lovely park that acts as public solarium for people of the third age. Rows of wheelchairs turned to face the sun, the benches filled with those elderly folk still in control of their own mobility.
I found a spot next to a lady who was dozing peacefully. When I sat down she woke with a start. She had beautiful blue eyes, even lighter than Juan Pablo’s. Her face was covered in tiny little stains which in her youth might have been freckles. I guessed she couldn’t have been more than seventy. I apologized for waking her.
‘Oh, don’t worry yourself, my dear,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t really sleep, or I can’t get to sleep at night.’
I turned my face up toward the sun and closed my eyes.
‘Where are you from?’ said the woman. ‘You can’t be from here, we don’t have people as pretty as you around here.’
I laughed happily. I told her I was from Mexico.
‘Beautiful country,’ she said.
‘You’ve been?’ I asked.
‘One of my kids is living in the capital,’ she said, ‘working for a Spanish company, a construction firm. I went to visit him in the summer and we took the grandchildren out to the Caribbean coast for a few days, to see the pyramids. It’s all very lovely. The only shame about your country is that the people in charge are so terrible. My son says it’s impossible to do business there unless you’re corrupt, and you’re always having to give money to some politician or other.’
I would have liked to tell her that wasn’t true, but since it was true I didn’t say anything. I kept quiet. Then I thought about how a lot of the blame was also down to the company where her son worked, who paid the bribes instead of reporting this extortion or refusing the deal.
‘What’s the company called, where your son works?’ I asked her.
She burst out laughing.
‘It’s all right to name the sin, dear,’ she said, ‘but not the sinner.’
‘I’m going to take a walk,’ Juan Pablo said, midmorning. ‘You should get outside a bit, too.’
I was stretched out in bed, in my pajamas, on page 235 of The Savage Detectives. I don’t know what I found more hurtful: the fact that his comment excluded me from his own walk (that he hadn’t only not invited me, but he’d made it impossible for me to go with him without humiliating myself) or that he believed he was in any position to offer me advice.
‘I don’t know who Juan Pablo thinks he is to offer me advice,’ I said, and went back to focusing on my book.
What was I expected to do? Go for a walk along the beach or a stroll through the Barrio Gótico? What for? To confirm that Barcelona is indeed an attractive city? That Barcelona is ‘stunning’, as the city council’s advertisement claims?
I’d rather stay behind with the wretched Barcelona of Fray Servando’s memoirs, that Barcelona of the poor where ‘the man who isn’t constantly on the go doesn’t eat’, that Barcelona of pigsties inside houses, of courtyards overflowing with garbage and excrement, that insurgent Barcelona where, following a mandate by the Bourbons, a bread knife needed to be kept chained to a table and it was necessary to ask permission and pay a fee to obtain a rifle for hunting rabbits.
Later I interrupted my reading because I was hungry. I found Facundo in the living room with his daughter Alejandra, who had just turned six and had come to spend the weekend with him (he’s separated from her mother).
‘Ále, do a picture for Vale,’ Facundo said to her, taking advantage of the opportunity to go to the bathroom.
I stood watching as the girl drew a sun, a princess, a flower, a mountain. She was absolutely terrible at drawing.
‘The princess is you,’ she said, and she painted her face black.
When Facundo returned, I went off to the microwave to reheat the spaghetti I had left over from dinner and I heard him scolding her.
‘But Vale isn’t black, Ále, the little thing’s going to be all sad now.’
‘She is black, Pápa, look at her properly and you’ll see she’s black.’ (The way she said ‘Pápa’, stressing the first syllable instead of the second, meant she was actually calling Facundo the Pope, or a potato.)
‘Stop being silly now, Ále, you look at her properly, you’ll see she’s just dark-skinned. Go on, do her another picture.’
I woke late and there was nobody in the apartment (Juan Pablo had gone off to the university). I thought I might make the most of this solitude to stretch out and read in the living room, where there’s natural light. I made myself a coffee and reread the last few pages of The Savage Detectives I’d read last night before falling asleep, while the milk was warming in the microwave. I’m terrible when I read novels, I forget things and I’m always having to go back, I fret about losing the thread of the plot. Reading a diary is completely different: knowing that what gives the narrative its logic is a life rather than a strategy, that is, an artifice, is something I find soothing.
The living room was chaos: colored pencils, dolls, drawings, little balls of plasticine, tiny fake gemstones scattered everywhere. The wreckage of Hurricane Alejandra, as Facundo calls it when he’s telling her off. I picked up only what was strictly essential to be able to make myself comfortable, piling things up on one of the little side tables. Among the drawings I found a piece of paper on which the girl had written several times:
i will go without staying
i will go like somebody going
I couldn’t settle down to my book for the feeling of alarm. I remembered a Korean horror movie and a story they used to tell in Coatepec when I was little, about a girl who’d said goodbye to everybody before dying in an accident. I’m going now, the girl would say, or that’s what people said she’d say. In the Korean movie, two little twin sisters filled one wall of their house with apocalyptic messages, which turned out to be death sentences on the people they’d pass on the street, over the course of the movie. Just as well it wasn’t long before Facundo got home.
‘Have you seen this?’ I asked him as he was opening the door, blocking his way.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said as he took off his jacket – ‘they’re lines from a poem, Alejandra’s shithead mother has it tattooed on her back – don’t you know it, didn’t you study literature? It’s by Alejandra Pizarnik, the shithead got it tattooed in Buenos Aires when she was eighteen and couldn’t wait to scram, she said Argentina wasn’t a country, it was an incurable disease, you can see what a shithead that shithead is.’
Two-thirty in the morning. I woke with a start. Juan Pablo was groaning. Sobbing. I didn’t know if he was having a nightmare or if he was awake. I rolled over to face him. The light had been left on again.
‘What’s up?’ I said when I saw he was shivering, his eyes lost on the wall to the left, hands pressing down over his breastbone.
‘Gastritis,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘Have you taken anything?’ I asked.
He said he had. He got up and went to the bathroom and when he came back he said he was going to the ER. While he got dressed I couldn’t decide whether or not I should go with him. I came to the conclusion that he could ask me to. Make me feel like he needed me. He went without saying goodbye. I started reading The Savage Detectives, unable to recover my sleep.
When he arrived back it was after four. They’d prescribed him the same medicine he was taking already.
In the morning, Juan Pablo insisted we go to the Fundación Miró and I accepted because I wanted to believe that he was finally beginning to react in some way. That the gastritis emergency might have meant he’d hit rock bottom. I thought some simulacrum of normality would do us good. But no such thing. All the good intentions (if he actually had any) evaporated along the way. We wandered the museum in silence and he didn’t even look moved by the Calder mobiles, which he apparently liked so much (and which he’d only seen previously in photographs and videos).
To cap it all, that night Juan Pablo started getting these rashes all over. He went back to the hospital. They said it was an allergy. According to Juan Pablo, he’d had it before and it had gone away in Xalapa. I told him that, as far as I knew, it was the opposite that happened: people got allergies from Xalapa’s damp and its mushrooms.
‘What Juan Pablo’s got looks like dermatitis nervosa to me,’ I said.
‘I’m sure you know better than the doctor,’ he said. ‘I had these rashes when I was little and my dad treated them. Don’t forget my dad’s a dermatologist.’
He put on a cream which I’m sure is for dermatitis. At least we didn’t fight.
This afternoon I went to Pompeu Fabra University to ask for information about the doctorate in humanities and it turned out there was a lecture at seven on auto-fiction, by Manuel Alberca. I took refuge in the library to kill time and then I looked for the classroom and crashed the talk uninvited, or rather, I thought I was crashing, because I ended up discovering it was actually a public event.
I loved the experience of a bibliography being transformed into a person of flesh and bone. I told Dr Alberca this at the end, I went up to thank him, for the lecture and for his writing, which had helped me so much in my undergrad thesis. I think I must have exaggerated my enthusiasm, because he even blushed, and I started telling him about my thesis on Fray Servando, I told him I was thinking of taking advantage of my stay in Spain to get more deeply into those fragments that can be read as travel writing, the most fun part of his memoirs, where he says outrageous things about Madrid and Barcelona, and that the following year I was going to matriculate in the doctoral program at Barcelona Uni, because I wanted to work with Nora Catelli (all half-truths, prompted by the euphoria of the moment). He told me he was at Málaga (I knew this already), in case there was anything he could help with. The university people were trying to hurry him along, with a certain amount of impatience that irritated me. He said they were going to have dinner somewhere nearby, and I should go with them. A big group headed out, saying they were going to a tapas bar, with everybody trying to attract Dr Alberca’s attention, talking about their research projects and what they were reading. As the group stretched out, I found myself increasingly lagging behind, shy and indecisive, invisible, until I was no longer a part of the group. It looked more like I was pursuing them. I saw the entrance to the metro in the distance and headed for that as though this had been my intention all along.
When I reached Julio Verne I found Juan Pablo at the entrance to our building. He was just going out to meet some friends from his doctoral program and his hair was all slicked up with gel. He asked if I wanted to come too, and since I imagined he thought I’d say no (and he wanted me to say no), I said yes. He didn’t seem especially annoyed that I’d accepted, as if he had much more important problems than his problems with me.
We walked down to a bar in Gràcia, crossing a couple of squares full of dogs and squatters, in silence the whole way. The squatters are a mystery to me, an astonishing phenomenon, one of those things I’d only ever seen in movies. In the bar, a cramped, dark, red-colored room in which it was almost impossible to breathe for the cigarette smoke, I was finally able to witness for myself what I’d been trying to imagine all this time: Juan Pablo’s new life. There were two guys from Mexico City, two Peruvian girls from Lima, a Colombian guy from Medellín, a Brazilian girl from São Paulo and a guy from Bahia. A Catalan guy from Tarragona. A Catalan girl from a town in Lleida. They had met at a Jungian mythology class. God knows what Juan Pablo was doing registered for that class, God knows what Jung has got to do with humor in Latin American literature.
We were at one end of the table, next to Iván, the Catalan from Tarragona, who immediately got talking to Juan Pablo about parody, with no prologue and no introduction, as though he were resuming a conversation that had been interrupted.
‘The problem with parody,’ he said to him, ‘is that for it to be intelligent it needs to be ideological, and if it’s ideological it stops being fun, or it’s only fun if you share the ideology yourself, and deep down that’s a real pain in the ass.’
I imagined they must be talking about Ibargüengoitia, from Juan Pablo’s undergrad thesis, or about his doctoral thesis project. Juan Pablo did indeed say he didn’t believe there was any ideological predisposition to Ibargüengoitia’s work.
‘If it has no ideological predisposition, it’s an empty parody, an idiotic one,’ said Iván. ‘You’re laughing at something, ridiculing it, but what for? For no reason? Just because you feel like showing that the thing you’re mocking is a piece of shit? And then what? Man, that’s just cynicism, it’s what Sloterdijk called wicked realism.’
He started to explain what Sloterdijk said in Critique of Cynical Reason about the ‘cynicism of a new age’, interspersing it with something from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and an example from Thoreau’s Walden, and for a few minutes, while Iván delved deeper into this chatter, I had the cheering sensation that nothing had changed and it was just any old night in Chiva, the bar in Xalapa where we used to go up until a few weeks ago. When Iván argued that the person parodying is implicitly attacking one ideology and defending another that he believes superior to it, Juan Pablo introduced Baudelaire into the argument, I say introduced not because he wasn’t relevant, on the contrary, he presented him as you might a gleaming collectible figurine or an academic totem.
‘Baudelaire says that laughter arises from the idea of the superiority of the person who’s laughing. The person who’s laughing is laughing at somebody else, at the other person who’s tripped and fallen over, for example, and the laugher is laughing because, deep down, he knows that he’s out of danger, that he’s not the one who’s falling.’
‘Baudelaire said that?’ asked Iván.
‘More or less,’ answered Juan Pablo. ‘Baudelaire said it more crudely. Baudelaire said that laughter is satanic because it arises from the idea of one’s own superiority. He says that the only person able to laugh at his own falling-over is a philosopher, who is in the habit of splitting himself in two and of, open quote, witnessing in a disinterested fashion the phenomenon of his ego.’
From that point, Juan Pablo predictably began to talk about a project he always talks about when he’s a little drunk, though without his usual vehemence: setting up a reading group for foreigners reading and talking about Ibargüengoitia’s stories, a project of literary sociology, really, which according to him would be seeking to confirm his hypothesis about the primacy of the reader’s prejudices over the text’s contents in the production of meanings, a project which would show how readers can appropriate a text and distort it to make it confirm their prejudices, in this case against Mexicans.
‘The fact that Mexicans are lazy, corrupt, a sort of degenerate race,’ said Juan Pablo.
‘But it’s not the readers who wrote the text,’ answered Iván, ‘however foreign they are. That thing you’re talking about is in the stories themselves, it was Ibargüengoitia who portrayed the Mexicans in that way.’
‘Fine,’ said Juan Pablo, ‘but you can’t compare the effect on a Mexican reader of a process of self-recognition, which could even be cathartic, with the effect on a foreign reader of a process of generalization of the other, which just confirms prejudices that lead to xenophobic attitudes.’
They went on in this way for a while longer, for a couple of beers longer, until Juan Pablo moved over to the other end of the table, to chat with the Peruvian girls. Iván forgot about the earlier conversation, in which I hadn’t said a peep, he changed the tape and started talking to me about medieval swords (his thesis is on an archaizing poet). I was so focused on keeping an eye on Juan Pablo (he didn’t exactly look very happy, more absent than anything else) that it took me a while to realize that Iván was coming on to me. They were subtle comments, which could be interpreted as jokes if I didn’t let him go any further, allowing him to withdraw with dignity in case I called a halt to his advances, but which were also the preface to a strategy of seduction if I reciprocated.
My puzzlement wasn’t because he was coming on to me, that might even have been flattering (in other circumstances), but because I realized now that Juan Pablo hadn’t introduced me as his girlfriend. And that he hadn’t mentioned me to them before. I interrupted Iván’s disquisition on Gothic crosses, I told him to wait for me, and escaped to the basement of the bar where there was a line to get into the women’s bathroom. I saw the half-open door of the men’s, I went in, it was a tiny room with a toilet, it was unoccupied, and I shut myself inside before anyone could object.
I cleaned the spatterings off the toilet seat and sat down to pee. I’d drunk three or four beers, and was starting to feel drunk. Fucking asshole, I thought, what a fucking asshole. Jerk. Motherfucker. Shiteater, as a Medellín Colombian would say. Dickhead, as Iván would say – Iván who wanted to pick me up, or rather to fuck me. I looked up and saw the door scratched from top to bottom. ‘We want Cataluña free from Latinos, Moors and Spaniards.’ ‘We’re all Catalans: we Latinos, Moors and Spaniards are more Catalans than this hick who’s just come down from the mountains.’ ‘Yes to Moors and Latinos, no to Spaniards.’ ‘Fascist scum.’ I took out the apartment keys and scratched in uppercase a line from Fray Servando that I thought would be a perfect way to conclude the decoration of this door: ‘YOU CAN’T TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT SPAIN WITHOUT OFFENDING THE SPANIARDS.’ It took me a while (there was impatient knocking on the door, twice).
I left the bathroom. I went back up to the bar. Juan Pablo and his friends were no longer there.
‘Know what I like most about you, shithead? You ain’t like all those shitheads who come live in Barcelona and spend their time open-mouthed like cretins, arrive here and go to the Ramblas every day or to look at the Sagrada Familia until one day some gypsy swipes their wallet, for being shitheads. But you’re different, shithead, you do your own thing, you know what you want, you don’t let yourself get impressed by the flashiness of this phony city. You get what I’m saying, shithead?’
I was going to say something, but Facundo carried right on, the price I had to pay for accepting his empanadas for dinner.
‘Honestly, shithead, it’s a deadly combination, on the one hand those shitheads who come live here and they think it’s more beautiful than Disneyland, and on the other those mega-shitheads the Catalans, who since they don’t know anything they say Cataluña’s got everything, seas and mountains, and think they live in paradise.’
Facundo filled his mouth with the half empanada which for several minutes had been waiting, hopelessly, for him to finish eating it. I took advantage of the pause to horn my way in:
‘That’s exactly what Fray Servando was saying at the start of the nineteenth century,’ I said. ‘That since Spanish people don’t travel they have no way of making a comparison, which is why they think Spain is the best thing in the world, the garden of the Hesperides.’
‘Right, shithead, exactly,’ and Facundo was off again, still chewing the empanada, I could even see the olives crushed between his molars. ‘They think Barcelona’s hot shit because they don’t know London or New York, seriously shithead, they don’t even know Paris.’
I went on eating empanadas, which were actually really delicious by comparison: after so many days eating spaghetti, the empanadas seemed a delicacy of the gods. I let Facundo prattle away to his heart’s delight, dropping in an ‘ah’ from time to time, swigging from the bottle of beer after every three or four bites. We were almost alone in the apartment, Juan Pablo hadn’t yet come back (he’d gone out in the afternoon ‘to go for a walk’), Cristian was on the night shift at the restaurant and Alejandra had been asleep in Facundo’s bedroom since nine-thirty. Facundo had unexpectedly felt obligated to invite me for dinner, which he said was to thank me for having spent the whole afternoon drawing with Alejandra, making bracelets, combing her hair, though in fact this exact same thing always happens whenever the girl comes over.
‘Before you there were a couple of Colombians living here, shithead,’ Facundo went on, ‘in the room where you now live with your shithead boyfriend. Incidentally, I got to tell you what a shithead your boyfriend is, the other day we were riding the elevator down together and I asked him where he was going. And you know what the shithead answered? Only that he was going to his Catalan class! Taking Catalan classes! You must be shitting me, shithead, the Catalans don’t want anybody else learning Catalan, what they want is to feel superior, or at the very least different, but your shithead boyfriend will discover that soon enough when he wants to talk Catalan in the street and nobody will even notice he exists. But I was going to tell you about the Colombians, a couple of shitheads the size of the Barça stadium, saying these totally shitheadish things the whole time about how beautiful Barcelona was, the shitheads used to make themselves sandwiches and sit in front of Gaudí houses to eat them, seriously such total shitheads those shitheads. They were always coming to me with these stories about museums and parks and did I know such and such a restaurant where they made the best pan con tomate anywhere in Cataluña, but seriously, shithead, I fucking live here! I don’t do the tourism thing unless it’s for a job, Lonely Planet can hire me and they can pay me a shitload of money and maybe then I’d put up with Gaudí and all his dicking around, shithead. And then the shitheads argued, the chick got together with a Catalan and left the shithead, obviously, the girl liked Barcelona so much she said nobody’s ever going to make me leave, and this shithead guy instead of putting a brave face on it, instead of making the most of the breakup to go around the world in eighty chicks, because that’s something Barcelona does have, shithead, here you can go around putting little flags on the map, there are such gorgeous chicks in Barcelona, oh man, Scandinavian ones, Black ones, Latin ones, Asian ones, whatever you feel like, shithead, but the shithead ups and goes back to Colombia! Such shitheads, those Colombians, they don’t deserve all the blessings God’s given them! Hey, listen, do you want a do a quick line? Would you mind if I did one?’
Best for me to stop writing now, to quit this exercise in the cheap picturesque to ridicule Facundo, my sad revenge for his having wanted to feel me up after doing three lines, and because he’d wanted to charge me ten euro for the empanadas after I’d indignantly rejected him, after I’d shouted that in case he hadn’t noticed I was Juan Pablo’s girlfriend and Juan Pablo might be arriving at any moment.
‘You’re such a shithead you haven’t even noticed, shithead?’ he said. ‘That shithead and you are heading in opposite directions, you’re a classic case of a couple broken up by Barcelona. Textbook case. Divorce a la catalana. People who arrive here together never make it, shithead. Barcelona’s a real bitch. I’m telling you this as someone who’s separated. You really are a shithead, it’s two in the morning, at this moment your shithead boyfriend must be fucking some shithead chick like you, a shithead he picked up in some bar in Gràcia or El Born, a shithead just like you, shithead, but more attractive. Who do you think you are, so dignified all of a sudden, Humble Maria from that fucking telenovela?’
3:45 a.m. I’ve finished reading The Savage Detectives. Juan Pablo’s not back yet.