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  Maybe we all live lives that aren’t our own. We’re hooked on otherness, forever chasing the next fix.

  Or maybe this life we call our own really is ours, but only relatively, because we’ve built it on memories and shaped it through imitation, following a game of mirrors; this life we call our own is referential, perhaps one hundred percent so, an accumulation of borrowed desires: not only the inevitable mélange of the people we admired as children, the people who educated us, the film stars we emulated (those too, of course), but also, why not, the accumulation of the desires of those we admired and imitated, those who educated us; as if we knew what moved them, what they really desired, as if they had ever known what they truly desired; a confused amalgamation of presumed desires by those we admire and imitate, therefore, that moves us further and further away from our true abilities and settles on preestablished outlines, powerless to burst through those steel frames imposed on us. As if we really know the desires, behaviors, and motivations of those we imitate. We’ve believed those borrowed identities, and borrowed new identities against the pretend capital of those borrowed identities; and that’s what we refer to as the self, although it’s nothing but false financial engineering applied to feelings, a thorough lie: a borrowed identity that borrows a new identity without any savings or starting capital. Left to our own devices, deep inside, we’ve no idea what we truly desire; we’ve never asked ourselves.

  When did this start? Was it always so? Are the family values and the power of religious and sexual iconographies that have been pressed upon us through every pore solely to blame for our detachment from ourselves and our true vocations? Can we be authentic without feeling ridiculous and remain within societal bounds? Are being authentic and being oneself the same thing? Is there a way to escape all this? No, there isn’t. Not at least without casting off all lines, without cutting free from our environment.

  Diego Lazkano wanted to believe that there was a way of going back to the root, to the authentic impulses of the self; that it was possible to apply a corrective quotient to the standard identity imposed on all of us, and that for that purpose, it would be interesting to analyze the things that repulse us, dig deeper into them; force ourselves to visit the places that disgust us and meet with people who repel us; because in that way our real identity would emerge: digging into that hatred and disgust, to our surprise, we may sometimes hit on something stimulating and attractive. And that would change our way of looking at the world and its inhabitants. It was easier to say all this than it was to actually do it, though.

  This affected everyone, for sure. But in Lazkano’s case it weighed more heavily because he was conscious of the issue of borrowed identity, which for most is an unconscious fact. Diego fed off two shadows, they were his sustenance, he let those two shadows settle in his head. Soto and Zeberio, Zeberio and Soto, that feeling of living for them had been inside him for years; as if it were his responsibility to live the lives they hadn’t lived or as if it were even possible to live three lives at the same time.

  Quite a few years passed before Diego saw Ines again. With time, the people who used to appear in newspapers no longer did, and those no one would have ever dreamed would be in print start to show up. Something like that happened with Diego and Ines when the former started to be a regular presence in the press thanks to the success of his novels; Ines, on the other hand, disappeared completely. They crossed paths at a very boring party during a film festival that Diego only attended because he had to. Two long decades and a lot of alcohol had taken their toll on Ines’ body, and he almost didn’t recognize her.

  “What a boring party, right? You remember me, right?”

  The voice, the peculiar lilt of the repeat, acted like a switch.

  He almost put his foot in it (“La Bella Ines!”) but luckily he was able to hold back.

  “Ines!”

  It wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet and she was already swaying on her high heels. The teeth were her own, although it looked like they’d moved around a little. He had to admit that the pounds she’d piled on didn’t do her much harm: she had lost the androgynous appearance of yore. Her body was equal to her bosoms now.

  She placed her hand on his shoulder, glass and all, and Diego panicked, thinking that she’d spill her drink on him.

  “Lazkano, Lazkano…how we’ve aged!”

  Especially you, thought Diego in a burst of vanity, steeling himself against unsolicited opinions.

  “You know the nickname we had for you in the theater group, right?”

  His fortress was at risk. The poor woman they called La Bella was in possession of a secret weapon that could hurt him.

  “The Little Prince.”

  “The Little Prince?”

  “I don’t believe it…no one’s told you until now?”

  He had to lie: “Yes, of course, but I’d forgotten.”

  “You were so blond, with those curls, you looked like a prince, a child, and those big gray eyes of yours…And always so elegant, with your shirt tucked inside your trousers, wearing the clothes your mommy bought for you, right? Oh, those were the days!” Lazkano bit his lips to swallow his pride.

  “It doesn’t look like Ken Loach is coming tonight. Why don’t you and I go to some quieter place? My house is not far from here…”

  He remembered Zeberio just then. How much he liked Ines – “I like the Astoria” – and how they’d disappeared him from the face of the earth before he could see through any of his dreams or fantasies. Yes, he would sleep with Ines no matter what. He owed it to Zeberio.

  “You’re nervous, right?”

  Nervousness masked a lack of appetite. The smell of incense and the elephant-print foulards hanging from the windows in lieu of curtains weren’t helping either.

  “Let me help you.”

  He kissed Ines, paying untold attention to her teeth, which looked like they were about to fall out, like domino pieces, one after the other. He felt the woman’s rough fingers grabbing hold of his penis. Ora et labora. If I were my cock, thought Lazkano, I’d run like hell from these claws. But Diego wasn’t his cock and she had her own plans, as he’d soon discover.

  “You like it, right?”

  Not much, he told himself. Things that we think but won’t say. Even less he liked her calling him “Little Prince” over and over as she rode him; the sentence “I want your milk, Little Prince” didn’t exactly rank high among the phrases that turned Diego on. Maybe it did among Zeberio’s? He doubted it. He felt obliged to remember him while he lay naked with Ines: “Is it you fucking her, Kepa? Or is it me in your place, in your honor, doing what you weren’t able to do to show you that I love you?”

  What memory of Kepa had Ines retained from that day when they had coffee together? Why didn’t he just ask her that? Why didn’t they try to reconstruct those moments together, sharing their contradictions – “No, it wasn’t like that: we drank coffee in the kitchen, not in the living room; and no, it wasn’t Joy Division, it was New Order” – and trying to throw light on the tricks memory had played on them? Instead of doing that, Lazkano tried to bring to fruition an old fantasy of Zeberio’s among elephant-print foulards and incense smells, in the pits of decadence, in a completely nonsensical way.

  Ines tied a knot in the condom and stared at the semen floating there, as if she were expecting to see fish in an aquarium.

  There might have been one last chance to do something with a modicum of sense: he should have stayed for breakfast and asked Ines about Zeberio. Ask her what she felt when she heard the news about his disappearance. If something had stirred inside. But no, Diego didn’t have the strength to stay. He abandoned La Bella Ines to her sleep and had difficulty finding the door, hidden behind a blue uniform that hung from a hook: it was a man’s uniform, a highway tollbooth one. Diego decided it was better not to think about the owner of that uniform at all.

  That’s the best part. The risk of the fall, and the certainty that you’ll have the chance to fall aga
in.

  They’re Fabian and Fabian. They call each other Fabian from under their respective hoods. They are like a comedy act.

  “¿Te gusta el teatro, verdad? You like the theater, right? Fabian likes it too…he’s so into theater, you know. He used to love the stage, but had to give it up because he wasn’t making enough to live on. Now he doles out the parts. Se encarga del reparto.”

  “Get it? Do you know what he means when he says I dole out the parts? Soy yo quien reparte.”

  The two men wearing hoods show Diego a bunch of photographs.

  “Do you know this one?”

  They’ve tied him to a chair and, with each question, give the legs of the chair a kick, making it stumble but not badly enough to fall over. It’s enough, however, to make the person on the chair feel dizzier and dizzier.

  “And this other one?”

  Diego doesn’t recognize anyone in the photographs and tells the truth: he has no idea. But every time he says so, one of them punches him in the stomach, while the other pinches him softly on the back in a very disturbing way while holding the back of the chair.

  He is feeling so unwell that he hopes, from the bottom of his heart, to see someone he knows in that pile of photographs. Let someone turn up, I’ll tell you that yes, I do know him: but please let someone I know turn up, for the love of God.

  At last, one: he’s not a fellow commando, nor anyone from the militant group, but a junkie from Herrera, a loser they all know, so desperate to shoot up he once held up an espadrille shop. Diego thought his time had come.

  “This one, yes, I know him.”

  Not one, but two punches to the stomach this time and, more surprisingly, the man who’s been pinching him softly on the back smacks the back of his head hard.

  “Are you pulling our leg? Everybody knows that guy.”

  Only then Diego begins to understand the mechanics of torture: the interrogation is completely illogical, the whole objective is for the tortured never to know what the next move is, the next reaction might be. In this way they erase your identity, they set your nerves on edge, leave you completely disoriented and terrified; and then, when you’re completely in their hands and at their mercy, confessing becomes your only option, the only means by which you may not lose your mind. You see no way out other than giving your friends up and, even though you hate yourself, that deformed self that you hate right then is so deranged and unmoored that you hate him as if he were someone else. Someone who’s intimately linked to you, but is not you.

  They put needles under his nails.

  “Should we apply the Boger swing to him, Fabian?”

  “A foreign technique? No, not the Boger swing…”

  Lazkano has no idea what the Boger swing might be. Blood is pouring out from under his nails. They play Rocío Jurado singing “Como una ola” in full volume on the cassette player.

  Like a wave.

  “Don’t torture me with that music.”

  Fabian starts singing:

  “Fui tan feliz en tus brazos, fui tan feliz en tu puerto…”

  I was so happy in your arms, I was so happy in your port…

  “He’s so theatrical, isn’t he?”

  They place a piece of metal between his teeth and lips and slap him on the face. When he spits on the floor he sees it’s a coin with Franco’s head on it, “Sentí en mis labios tus labios de amapola, como una ola.”

  I felt your poppy-soft lips on my lips, like a wave.

  Do not let me go, thinks Lazkano, if I must continue being a rag doll I will, but I’d rather be in your hands, with my wrists bound together; don’t reward me by removing the handcuffs, keep squeezing me like a lemon after I tell you everything I know, until there’s nothing left of me, I beg of you. Destroy me. I deserve it.

  They force him to lie facedown and put one of the chair legs on the back of his knee. They perforate and burn the soles of his feet. When they crush his little toe with a pair of pliers, he waits no more. He lets it out. There was no need to apply the Boger swing. Apply or perform? Who knows.

  “Moulinaou Street,” he says.

  “Dónde hostias. Where the fuck is that?”

  “In Angelu.”

  In his naïveté, Lazkano thinks they’ll get him out of that basement and into the police station. But the truth is that they are not in a cell in a police station, but somewhere else. He should have realized it, but he’s too out of it to notice details, to inflict the measure of time and space on those senseless events. It’s a big farmhouse, set apart, far away from noises: car noises or any other kind. The building seems to sit on top of a hill. Only the sound of birds outside, birds singing without a worry in the world. When they climb the stairs he sees a big window and it seems to him that, as they approach it, the two men, Fabian and Fabian, who drag him off, arms bound, clasping his elbows tight, lessen the pressure, as if in getting close to the window they were giving him the option to kill himself, which is what he thinks: Throw yourself out the window and redeem your betrayal, if you have the balls. Yes, it’s an invitation, he won’t be a rag doll anymore, he won’t be a traitor anymore, one leap and he’ll never have to look at himself in the mirror again, the window is open, he can hear the birds singing to him, “Jump, Diego, c’mon, don’t be a coward, the birds are asking you to do it, show now the bravery you didn’t show before. Fly.”

  And he does.

  His two keepers let him go – he knows they were inviting him to do it, there is no doubt now – he rests a shoulder on the frame and jumps out the window with his eyes closed. He falls onto some ferns, and soon sees Fabian and Fabian laughing by the window: he fell only about a meter and a half. “What, you thought the torture was over? No way! Your pathetic suicide attempt was part of the game, it was just the last turn of the screw to totally wreck your identity.” The last one? Surely not…the show must go on!

  “See, Fabian?”

  “I didn’t think he’d dare. Anyway, he didn’t shout anything when he jumped…I was expecting a “Gora Euskadi Askatuta,” freedom for the Basque Country, or something like that.”

  Fat Fabian reaches out to Tall Fabian, who is apparently so fond of the theater, and hands over three brown one hundred peseta bills for the bet they’d made. They both come out through the window, which can’t be more than two meters high. The two hooded men help him stand up and Lazkano, humiliated, decides he won’t look at them again. Then, as if they’d decided that their captive had seen too much, they cover his eyes with a black, opaque eye mask, before they force him to climb into the trunk of the car. He spends the rest of the evening there. They don’t move the car. When they take him out and bring him back to the same cell, he notices that it’s colder outside.

  He thinks he hears the echo of Soto and Zeberio’s screams through the corridors.

  “Do you recognize your friends’ screams?”

  They caught them. On Moulinaou Street. In Angelu.

  It’s them, there’s no doubt. He’s especially shocked by Zeberio’s deep voice, so accustomed he was to his silence and discretion. His howls are anything but discreet.

  Finally, they let Diego leave. Look at it this way: sometimes setting you free when others are still imprisoned is a form of revenge.

  “You haven’t been very helpful, but it’s all right. Since you’ve belonged to a theater group and my friend Fabian here loves showbiz, we’re gonna let you go.”

  Diego is about to say that, truly, he hates the theater, that it’s Soto who loves it, but he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t say a word. Not this time.

  “But before anything else, we’re going to do you a favor.”

  Fabian takes out his switchblade.

  Idoia’s call caught Lazkano by surprise. He hadn’t heard from her at all since he’d moved from Angelu to Lille, and from Lille to Donostia. Only sporadically he’d get indirect news about Ana: she had two kids and still worked at the library, although she was in the administration now. She was one of the bosses. She lived in Larr
atxo, a neighborhood of Donostia, and he never saw her in the city, although he remembered the shiny puddles of her green eyes and her perfect twenty-year-old body every morning. He still loved her, the way only a flawless happiness one has run away from can be loved.

  “I’d like to interview you…”

  How things change, comrade: Idoia had left Egin, the leftist Basque newspaper and now worked in the Bilbao offices of El Mundo, a right-leaning Spanish newspaper.

  Instead of one of the cafés from their second life – when they decided they’d stop sleeping together – they chose a café from their first life, one they used to frequent as a couple. After the interview, they happily stay on to have a beer in the Barandiaran. They’ve plenty to tell each other. Idoia’s mom has cancer, life has begun to show them that it’s time to turn the corner.

  Cruel irony: Diego confesses that his mom has cancer too; they diagnosed her two months ago. His father disappeared and was never seen again, dementia. Shocked by the news and the connection spontaneously reawakened between them, Idoia can’t suppress a sincere “baizea, it’s not true, is it?” that transports Diego to a different era. She always had a beautiful voice, although she was deaf to his calls to join the theater group. They order another beer and continue talking about the stage and the malignancy of the tumors and their chances of remission, the benefits of a change of diet, the evils of red meat and other matters. They are thoroughly informed on the subject. Idoia more than Diego, which doesn’t bode well for Idoia’s mom, Diego decides. The more you know, the more serious the illness.

  Idoia hasn’t changed at all in these years, at least not as much as I have, and that doesn’t bode well for me either, Diego then tells himself.

  “I didn’t know this sickness was so related to numbers. Everything is about ‘rates.’”

  “Numbers soothe people.”

  “I don’t know if they soothe people, but they soothe doctors for sure.”

  The ailments of parents. A signal: in a few short years they’ll become our ailments. It’s about time they told each other what they kept to themselves in the past, without shame or remorse. “I was so hurt by your indifference, you were so insensitive when you delayed the publication of my article on Dario Fo.” He should tell her: “I loved biting your neck, your way of suggesting we should fuck; how you’d wait for me in bed, naked, smiling, how you’d caress and scratch the wall with your eyes closed as you straddled my face tempting my mouth with your slit; I regret not waking next to you more often. But we said no remorse.” No tricks either, no suggestions that they could have something together. No regrets and no false hopes.