I SAID GOODBYE to Carolina, asking her to forgive me for having burst into her life in this way. All I was trying to do was to understand Jaime in order to break free of the love spell he had cast on me. I had no wish to harm her in any way; she was no more than a poor slave to a selfish monster who felt only anger towards all women.
I suppose that, as time goes by, Carolina will end up hating me.
I have to get out of the apartment. I can’t go on paying the rent and the heavy expenses, and besides, I can’t live here any more. Every room reminds me of Jaime and his crazy behaviour. I wrote to the agency, telling them we were going to hand back the apartment because we had separated. According to the contract, I have to pay them compensation because we have not been here a year. I’m responsible because I was the one who signed. I’m finding all this kind of thing extremely difficult. At night I can hardly sleep, and I’m in a nervous state the whole time. I’m still in touch with Carolina. She calls me frequently to tell me Jaime follows her to work every day, begging her to forgive him and take him back. Up to now, she has refused. But I know she will end up falling into his arms again. It’s hard to resist Jaime. She’ll go back to him because she’s afraid of ending up alone, and he needs her because he’s completely lost, and Carolina is the only person who really knows him.
I have moved fairly rapidly to a much smaller flat on the other side of town from the Olympic Village. I called the removal firm to come one morning, but the previous evening Jaime got in while I was out and took all the valuables from the apartment. In other words, he’s left me with next to nothing. I was almost grateful, because in my new place there is hardly any room. I’ve gone from an apartment of a hundred and twenty square metres to a flat of about fifty square metres, hidden away in the city. I came across it by chance on one of my walks around Barcelona.
To get revenge, Jaime also destroyed the marble worktop in the kitchen. I don’t know how he did it, but it’s caused me a huge headache with the owner, who obviously is asking me to pay for it to be repaired. My situation could not be worse. I have no savings, I have debts everywhere because of Jaime’s wrecking of the apartment, and on top of all that, I’ve left my job with Harry. I resigned because I knew I couldn’t do it properly feeling as bad as I do. It would not have been professional of me to carry on. Above and beyond all this, I feel completely destroyed: all I have left in the world are the bitter memories of being in love with someone who never loved me, who simply laughed at me, took advantage of me, and who cheated me in every sense.
Strangely, I don’t feel at all jealous of Carolina. On the contrary, I think we felt a certain solidarity from the moment we met. She never called into question what I told her about my relationship with Jaime, and I’ll always be grateful to her for the way she opened her house to me. In the end, I’m nothing more than a stranger to her who burst into her world and brought part of it crashing down.
Jaime has tried to speak to me several times. He knows where I’ve moved to, because he followed me as well. One night, he rang the doorbell. I felt such a pang of the love that I still feel for him that I let him in. He was drunk. He begged me to forgive him, and told me he had ended everything with Carolina. I knew this was a lie, because Carolina and I are still in touch. He also told me his business was on the rocks, and that he needed money. He was trying to pull the wool over my eyes once more, but finally I managed to throw him out into the street.
I still do not really understand why Jaime had to do this to me. He has lots of women at his feet, and many of them are far richer than me.
I discovered that the jar of powder he said was from a pharmacy, for treating his ankle, was in fact pure cocaine. Even over this, I tried to find reasons to excuse him. Because I still love him. From now on I have to fight against two enemies: firstly, against him and the memory of him; and secondly, against myself, and falling back under his spell.
Several months have gone by while I have felt lethargic, incapable of doing anything. I can hardly remember what has happened. I shut myself up in my flat, without even bothering to move my furniture from where it was stacked against the walls. I haven’t been eating; I simply let myself float along. I want to annihilate myself. I’m letting myself die; one night I prayed with all my remaining strength that the end would not be long in coming.