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  He realizes the seriousness of his father’s issues when he has to go to pick him up at the post office. He rings him in tears: “I came to the wrong place, Diego,” and Diego finds his father’s words hard to comprehend, why wouldn’t he just, after having gone to the wrong place, reroute and go home on his own. Even the reason for the call itself, “I came to the wrong place,” “Come pick me up, I’m at the post office,” is foreboding – his father never calls him – and he wonders if perhaps he’s had an accident he’s ashamed to mention over the phone.

  It’s raining buckets and instead of in the street, he finds his father standing next to the security guard. From the distance, his father’s profile looks pathetic and defeated.

  The security guard hands over his father, as if he’d been in custody.

  “Is this your father? I think he got disoriented.” Lazkano nods and father and son walk away, son holding father gently by the elbow in the rain. Disoriented, what do you know about that, it’s not like security guards are the most oriented people in the world, Diego tells himself.

  “What happened, aita?”

  His father shows him the books: they have library stickers and have gone through many hands. They’re bestsellers, good for passing the time; Lazkano doesn’t have the will to register any of the titles, it’s been many years since he followed the whims of general readers, it depresses him to see the shit people read.

  “I wanted to return them to the library. Today was the last day, you see? I can’t keep these books for a day longer.”

  He speaks as if it were a matter of life or death, stressed out of all proportion, as if that last day were Judgment Day. And, besides, his habit of going to the library…it’s not like they are exactly short of money. There are too many things about his father that he still doesn’t understand, things he gave up hope of understanding a long time ago.

  “And why didn’t you return them? Should we go together now?”

  If Diego thought the old man couldn’t crumble any further, he was mistaken. His browbeaten look makes him lose three inches in height. Something or someone is shrinking his father. With eyes full of tears, powerless even to feel shame, he tells him:

  “I went to the wrong place, I got confused, Diego. I got in line at the post office, waited until I reached the counter, and got it into my head that I had to post these books.”

  They’re about twenty steps away from the post office, closer to the back gate of the Buen Pastor Cathedral than the post office itself, and unable to fit under one umbrella, they each offer one arm to the deluge that is falling from the sky. The main post office building in Donostia and the building that hosts the Koldo Mitxelena Library look the same from the outside. The mirage of symmetry. Anyone could get confused.

  “You were absentminded, that’s all. Let’s drop the books off now, stop worrying.”

  “You don’t understand, Diego: I was convinced that the books were parcels that I needed to post. I waited my turn for half an hour…the post office employee looked completely puzzled. Do you know what that means?”

  Lazkano had always heard – and this is something that makes him feel guilty – that in cases of mental illness, the family usually spots the signs before the sick person; what’s more, even when the sick person notices something, he tends to dismiss the first few symptoms and minimize their importance, and it’s the people around him who worry and urge him to go to the doctor. It isn’t common for the sick person to detect his own illness, because mental illness almost always brings self-delusion with it. This wasn’t the case with Gabriel Lazkano and, for Diego, this was clear evidence of the scant attention everyone at home paid the old man. Simultaneously, and rather frightened, he tried to assess how much and in what ways awareness of his illness would affect his father’s life. How long since neuronal synapses began to disconnect? Had they detected the illness sooner, would he have had a better chance of delaying its progression with the help of medication? There was no way of knowing. For the next three or four weeks, Lazkano canceled all his commitments – he was launching his latest book, which was apparently going to surpass the success of his previous ones – and together with his mother and sister, took his father from test to test, from hospital to hospital.

  The first diagnoses coincided in saying that the analyses didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. But they were cautious all the same: “The brain is still the great unknown.” After these positive messages, he received his mother’s call.

  She didn’t call him in tears but, rather, after having cried. She pointlessly tried to hide it from him. Lazkano’s job required that he observe the human condition, instincts, yearnings, impulses, and construct coherent fiction based on such observations; details are his life, it’s the only ability he has that he can be proud of. And so he immediately noticed his mother’s unease.

  “Your father has started to say strange things.”

  Earlier than they thought, without warning, and while all scans and MRIs showed nothing conclusive, they entered the uninhibited phase. He’s well for long stretches, and then starts saying the first thing that pops to his head. Or maybe it’s not exactly like that, Lazkano thinks, maybe rather than saying the first thing that comes to mind, what he’s doing is saying things that were kept in the back rooms of his mind for a long time; strange opinions, revelations and reproaches that seem too well chosen, things that happened a long time ago that he kept from his family, things whose veracity or falseness were hard to establish.

  “When is Angeles coming?”

  “Angeles?”

  “Maybe I didn’t tell you…remember the time I went to Amsterdam? I met the love of my life there: she lived in Eivissa, I should visit her, it’s been so long. I bet the weather is wonderful in Eivissa right now, unlike this depressing drizzle.”

  When Josune, Diego’s sister, asked him to stop talking nonsense, Gabriel Lazkano took the photograph of a young woman out of his wallet. As he threw it on the table like a mus player who shows a winning hand, their mother started wailing and crying.

  Diego tries to remember when was it that aita had gone to Amsterdam for work. It’d been at least fifteen years: he took a course on natural pest control and “sustainable” methods of insect elimination. There was a word he would jokingly use quite often around the house in that time: ecopoison.

  “You’re not sick…you’re going crazy.”

  Soto is angry with Gloria. He thinks the director is too soft. She’s not sufficiently engaged. “Art, art…nonsense; there are terrible things happening out there, primo, and Gloria doesn’t want to know.” She seldom joins them in demonstrations. And there are plenty springing up at the moment: she didn’t go with them to the march against the Lemóniz nuclear station, or to the gathering in Bilbao in support of some abortion practitioners sentenced to six years in prison. “She lives in her own fucking Tower of Babel, bourgeois daughter of the bourgeois,” he tells Lazkano, admonishingly. “Or what’s worse: an aristocrat at heart; because the bourgeois might do things badly, but at least they try to do something.” Today the director told them off again for going to “those meetings.” It’s up to you whether you go or not, but you’d better come to rehearsal on time, do you hear?” “Who does she think she is, primo? Our mother? Miss Maria Pilar?”

  “You’re going to end badly.”

  “Don’t expect me to come to get you out of jail.”

  “Like we’ve money to pay an attorney.”

  She unleashed all that at them, and Soto was incensed. He took the libretto and threw it in her face, while he shouted that if she kept disrespecting him, she would have to count him out. “Are you coming, primo?” But Lazkano knew it was just a tantrum. Zeberio picked up the libretto leaves strewn all over the floor. Lazkano placed the scenes in order again, all of them, one by one, even though Soto hadn’t numbered them.

  Despite the fact that Lazkano only speaks a few lines in the play, he practically knows the whole thing by heart.

  Shor
tly after Gabriel let his tongue loose, he and his wife started sleeping in separate beds. And, finally, the diagnosis arrived. The confirmation came from Santos Herguera, an old family friend. For a long while now, he’d been chief of the Division of Cognitive and Memory Disorders in a hospital in Dallas, and they took advantage of his summer holiday in Donostia to pay him what in other circumstances would have been a first visit.

  The least of it is putting a label on it. It’s some kind of dementia, not Alzheimer’s. He showed them color diagrams of his brain, sophisticated tests they don’t understand at all.

  “And they haven’t been able to tell you anything? I can’t believe it.”

  It’s unfathomable that in the twenty-first century American doctors have to come to reveal things to us; unforgivable, according to Diego. There was no miracle cure that would stop the disaster: there were mental and physical exercises, strict controls, pills of every color; the family was going to have to keep a very watchful eye on him to make sure he took them all.

  “Look after your father, but take a break from looking after him every now and then too, take time to look after yourselves.”

  None of it stopped old man Lazkano from speaking about Eivissa, or addressing his wife with the name of the mysterious Angeles. Always mixed in with some fruity sexual fantasies that Diego cringed hearing out of his father’s mouth: “When will you let me come all over your tits, Angelines?” Sentences which, once the initial shock and scandal wore off, the family processed and accepted with complete normalcy, and drove Diego to understand the depths of his father’s proclivities. A true writer must learn to extract some learning from even the most adverse set of circumstances. And Diego was sure of his vocation, even if he hadn’t always been, even if he’d had to slam shut a lot of the rooms in his mind in order to ascertain his vocation.

  No: his life hadn’t been easy either.

  Diego’s father sometimes embraced his wife passionately, but her embrace wasn’t really what he sought, rather, he sought the memory of that woman called Angeles. He couldn’t understand why she rejected his kisses. Only when he was asleep did his wife plant a butterfly kiss on him. Only then did he seem like her old husband, her Gabriel.

  Diego and his sister tried to find traces of the woman called Angeles. A phone number, her complete name, her family names. Begging for discretion, they showed her photograph to his father’s closest friends. But no one knew anything. He hid his secret very well, somewhere.

  After a series of ups and downs, after six months, his mood changed. “I’m sick, right?” he’d ask suddenly, and then spend hours not saying anything, with a lost look in his eyes.

  They institutionalized him when he refused to eat and go to the bathroom. Barely a month later, when it seemed that the strict hospital discipline and routines had had a stabilizing effect on his situation, Gabriel Lazkano disappeared.

  He left a note, an astonishing feat for someone in his state: “Begoña, Josune, Diego, I love you but I have to live my life now.” The names of his wife and children impeccably written in capital letters, the ghost of Angeles nowhere to be seen. Neurologists and psychiatrists didn’t know what to think. “It’s strange,” they said, and Diego began to feel bored with the narrowness of their linguistic register: strange is not a scientific word in the slightest.

  Neither the police nor the family ever heard from Gabriel Lazkano again.

  It’d be cruel to say so, but to think it is human: although for several weeks Diego Lazkano and his family lived through many sleepless nights and sighed many hopeless sighs, waiting for a call that never arrived, their father’s disappearance also had the inadmissible inverse effect of bringing them peace.

  Many years had passed since Soto and Zeberio disappeared: strangely enough, Lazkano didn’t initially associate his father’s disappearance with the disappearance of his two friends. It didn’t cross his mind to think that, although very differently, his father, like Soto and Zeberio, was also “disappeared.” Disappeared, disappeared, disappeared…disappearance is the axis of his life, an eddy that pulls him who knows where.

  For the first two years after their father’s disappearance, Diego and Josune visited the morgue together several times, taking turns. After eight years the official declaration of his death arrived and, with it, a sort of suspended stillness: a precarious, nameless stillness, a nuanced quietude that reverberated in their chests.

  Lazkano continued to write; Josune, teaching dance. Their mother gathered the pieces and reassembled the puzzle of her life, substituting the missing pieces with the fabric of oblivion and fantasy.

  “Do you think they do this in every theater in the world, Gloria? This only happens here because this country is ridiculous! A show in Basque at eight p.m. and another at ten p.m. with the same actors, acting out the same parts in the same play, but in Spanish this time. It’s schizophrenic…we waste our talent, Gloria, how can we do a good job this way…it’s impossible!”

  Soto is indignant. The play left people indifferent and he blames their lukewarm reception to the need to work in both languages simultaneously.

  “If we don’t do it this way, it’s not profitable.”

  “Yeah right, c’mon, Gloria…”

  “Should we break up the company? Function at an amateur level? Perform only in sports centers and schools?”

  “As if we didn’t perform in sports centers and schools already…”

  “The Vulpes that you talk so often about…don’t they play in even dingier places?”

  “But they’re punks!”

  “So are we then.”

  “You? You, the barefoot countess, a punk?”

  “I’m sorry but things are what they are.”

  The argument wasn’t new, but it came up again after the ten o’clock show, because Lazkano inadvertently said one of his lines in Basque during the Spanish performance. Lazkano was completely dejected, although the others tried to rest importance to his mistake.

  “The audience didn’t even notice, Diego: you have to realize that they only come to see it once, and avant-garde pieces often mix languages, I’m sure they found a reason for your speaking in Basque…”

  Soto didn’t miss a beat:

  “Avant-garde? Are you trying to insult me, Gloria? Are you?”

  It’s hopeless to try to cheer Diego up. Today Lazkano wants to be alone and doesn’t join the others in the celebration. To make matters worse, he still hasn’t heard from Idoia: she didn’t show up to see the play over the weekend, and the last time he called her he didn’t get through because apparently she was “in a meeting.”

  The morning after his mental lapse he buys the newspaper and glances at the contents of the culture section, curious about what might be to blame for the new delay in the publication of his article on Dario Fo. He opens the newspaper impatiently end sees that there’s a full-page article written in Spanish substituting his piece: SILVIO RODRÍGUEZ, LA PLUMA Y LA TROVA. Quill and song, indeed – everything is falling into place. He scrunches up the newspaper until it’s completely wrecked and throws it into the trash can next to the newspaper kiosk, to the seller’s astonishment. He regrets his childishness as soon as he’s done it and buys another copy of the newspaper in another kiosk on his way home. He hasn’t set foot in the university for weeks, but he doesn’t care. Sociology can go fuck itself. Exams are a long way away. He opens the newspaper’s culture section again and checks the by line of the article on Silvio Rodríguez: Mikel Remiro. He finds the article quite underwhelming, inconsequential, and filled with pompous, overwritten clichés and enough adjectives to make anyone puke. Silvio Rodríguez, Scorpions…maybe this Remiro dude knows a thing or two about music, but as a writer, he’s pathetic. Diego tries to face the truth: Idoia left him for a third-rate writer; who knows, maybe that secret relationship had something to do with her throwing him overboard so happily. No, Idoia didn’t play by the rules. Just as the suicidal impulse living inside his head was contemplating different ways of endi
ng his life – poison, hara-kiri, death leap – his phone rang. It was Ana, the protagonist of the play. She was calling to ask how he’s doing and to see if they can meet up for a coffee.

  The great Ana Etxarri, the most beautiful Ana with the loveliest smile. One of those gorgeous women men stop paying attention to because they seem unreachable. Of course they could meet up for coffee. In fact, he needs that coffee above everything else if he’s going to gather the wherewithal to continue taking part in the play. Next week they have six shows booked in Bilbao, and while pondering multiple methods of suicide, one thousand times he decides and one thousand times he postpones the decision to quit and ask Gloria to replace him.

  Ana is so different from Diego. A woman of clear vocation who, since starting drama school, has thought of nothing else. She attends every workshop: mime, voice, kataki, eastern dances, fencing…if one amongst them is to become a great actor, they all agree, it will be Ana Etxarri. That’s why Gloria has chosen her as the lead.

  “Do you remember the course we did with Roulant?”

  Lazkano makes effeminate hand movements as he mouths an answer. It wasn’t difficult to imitate Professor Roulant, who had come from Lyon to teach an intensive weekend course.

  “The fundamental lesson, c’est ça: ‘It’s a matter of making a drawing with gesture, and then filling in the drawing with words. From that moment, movement and text go together, hand in hand. To remember the gesture is to remember the words.’ But I’m incapable.”

  “You have to make an effort.”

  “Making an effort is hard.”

  “You’re not wrong about that.”

  Lazkano made an effort, but didn’t succeed. He felt increasingly uncomfortable on stage, and that would be his last collaboration with Gloria’s company. He decided to abandon that vocation and focus on his studies. Besides, as Diego liked to say since he began waking up next to Ana: two actors in one house would be too much.