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  “Are you still with Remiro?”

  Mikel Remiro. Silvio Rodríguez, la pluma y la trova. Quill and song.

  Idoia opens the palm of her hand as if to signal five, and displays her wedding band with a look of resignation. That, at least, is what Diego sees.

  She tells him that they don’t have children: they tried, but she never got pregnant. “It’s Mikel, he can’t.” They’re considering adoption now. China, Ukraine, Morocco. Diego has a dentist’s appointment at five p.m., but he doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t even call to cancel the appointment. It’s raining outside, it’s cozy inside, but the café is filled to the brim, they feel observed, the atmosphere is not precisely conducive to discretion, everyone can see them. This would be the moment to say goodbye and wish each other the best and wish the worst for their respective mothers’ rhizomatic creatures. But they don’t want to. Even though they should start talking about things that can’t be talked about in order to keep talking, that’s not something they want either. They’ve already deconstructed their old friends’ CVs, as well as the first divorces and separations among them – special emphasis on that point: “So many of us fail at it” – and the name and clientele changes of the bars of the good old days; they even go through a quick assessment of current politics, a subject they never touched in the good old days. They are back at the beginning.

  “Soto and Zeberio – that was so hard.”

  “It has been hard, it’s still hard,” he corrects himself in his mind. He thinks it, but doesn’t say it.

  Diego would like to say many things to his friend from a bygone time (“I am weakened, we are both weak,” things that we say when we feel weak), but he knows that more intimate circumstances are required to talk about certain intimate matters, and that only far from the world, on a white bed in a white room, with white sheets and their two naked bodies, only there would he be able to tell her most of the things he’s got in mind. He’d like to ask her many questions and for her to ask him just as many. And answer them one by one openly, caressing each other’s backs vertebra by vertebra, as if counting the rings of a felled tree, staring at each other every now and then, spying on each other to establish how much they’ve aged, and, afterward, as a form of psychotherapy, tell each other some too-painful things, having chosen to repress others that might hurt even more.

  The conversation takes place in Lazkano’s house: Diego lying on top of Idoia, his increasingly engorged penis quiet on the furrow of her butt, and the girl with both hands folded under her chin, her auburn-dyed hair cascading down her back in a long ponytail, nothing to do with her garçon hair days, both looking out the window instead of looking into each other’s eyes. Both naked in a room where everything is white. Both lamenting the miserable world out there without much conviction.

  He’d like to tell her, and he does: “I discovered ways and pleasures that I never knew with you.” He’d like to tell her, and he does: “You left me only good memories.” He’d like to tell her, and he does: “I owe you the feeling of not having wasted my youth in vain.” He’d like to tell her, and he does: “There is such a thing as dysfunctional desire, a construction of desire that helps us function, and you’ve collaborated in the construction of my dysfunctional desire. You are important to me, even though I have hardly seen you in these past few years. Or maybe that dysfunctional desire of mine is what’s important.”

  He’d like to tell her some things, and he does, but at one point the thought crosses his mind that many of them he should say to Ana, instead of Idoia.

  “I’m not saying anything new, but, if we were transparent, if our thoughts were in plain sight, we’d all be in hell and be happily ashamed…or shamefully happy, I’m not sure,” Idoia says. “Happy criminals,” she adds then.

  “It’s almost like you are the writer,” Diego says. She’s still very good at verbal ping-pong.

  Maybe she still doesn’t like minty men, Diego’s eyes well up, and his tears move Idoia to tears. How time wrecks us. Does my love bother you?

  “I want to be your purveyor of songs again.”

  They should have parted as friends at the Barandiaran Café, avoid the conversations and secrets shared in bed; soon, on the table they vacated, young horny couples would sit and not feel obsolete while talking about love…They should have parted as friends, but they weren’t friends: they’d been lovers, they’d stopped hearing from one another, their parents were sick, they’d had coffee, avoided certain subjects and tentatively approached others, they’d whispered some things into each other’s ears and clumsily undressed one another; and realized, as soon as they walked out into the damp night, that the rain had aged less than them, and that they had no intention of returning to their previous lives.

  They were too tired to resist the temptation of staying in bed, naked, on top of one another, giving in to desire.

  Before long, Idoia had gathered her belongings and moved to Diego’s. At the beginning, Lazkano thought she’d brought an astonishingly small amount of luggage along. With time, he understood that she’d left everything to her husband, that she felt guilty at having abandoned him and that, as some sort of compensation, she had left him in a state of pretend widowhood. “I’ll no longer be with you, but all the things we shared will stay with you, the objects and memories, the things we bought together and separately, the practical and symbolic purchases, I leave them all here; you decide what to do with them.” It wasn’t just her attempt at minimizing frictions after the emotional breakup of their long-standing coexistence; it was also her way of giving herself completely to Diego, or at least that’s what he thought, because if their love didn’t survive, Idoia would be left with nothing; and the fact that she wanted to share his material life too, his pots and pans and his sheets, the blankets on his sofa and the chairs on his balcony, his nail clippers and hair dryer – isn’t that commitment? He understood it all as a sign of her unconditional love: “I believe in this relationship with every fiber of my being, you’re the gamble of my life, I do not contemplate the possibility of the crumbling of our love, I don’t have a plan B.”

  And things went well for the first few months, Idoia grew used to her new habitat, to Diego’s ungodly hours – he always wrote at night – and the incomprehensible neurosis that led him to lock up his writing desk and his study, to that insane secrecy that she found initially interesting, later ridiculous, and finally exasperating, to his unpredictable mood swings, to his warped reasons not to have children (“my genes are too defective, it’s time to put an end to this genealogical tree”).

  Diego revealed every detail of something he’d never confessed to anyone before, surprising even himself as the words came out of his mouth in front of Idoia: how and where those marks on his skin came to be – “But before anything else, we’re going to do you a favor” – after he confessed that Soto and Zeberio were on Moulinaou Street – “where the fuck is that?” “In Angelu” – and how it was then, only then, when he’d said all he could say, once the torturers knew what they wanted to know, once he’d tried to kill himself, it was then and not before that they branded him with those letters that would remind him not of the police, but of the name his own comrades would give him: they didn’t spell out that Diego was a terrorist, a kidnapper, or an assassin, they weren’t the GAL death squad’s initials or his captors’ signature, no; what they wrote on his skin was nothing but the truth. Under torture, yes, but, all the same, he’d given up two of his comrades who’d been forced to go into hiding after holding up a bank with toy guns (the real ones didn’t arrive in time), two puppies who were too young for crime and repentance; even though they were older than him, they were still too sleepy, their “sleeper cell” not fully formed yet.

  If they had captured Soto instead, would he have given up Zeberio and Lazkano? He would never know.

  “Not with a b, you ignoramus! It’s written with a v! ¡Es con uve!”

  When he heard them say it, he couldn’t imagine what they were doi
ng on his back, still hurting too much from the needles they’d stuck under his nails and on the soles of his feet, because apparently no traces are left on the soles of feet; we’ve inherited, from our primate cousins, the ability to walk on thorns and keep going. And that travesty on Lazkano’s back. Did one of them really think it was written with a b? It was possible, although in that moment he thought it was a calculated strategy, repeated over and over with the object of blasting his morale. And it worked, of course it worked. The pain of not being able to guess what Fabian and Fabian were tattooing on his back was no lesser pain than the one caused by the stabs into his feet and under his nails: “What are they doing? What are they writing with a b instead of a v?”

  “Qué más dará. Who cares, let’s leave it as is, with a b.”

  Here’s a hitherto unexplored classification that pushes beyond the typical good cop, bad cop dichotomy: educated cop, uneducated cop.

  So he carried that silent brand with him, which he’d so often contemplated in the mirror, which he never dared show anyone, which was too distressing to show in court (and what was the point, anyway, they always said wounds like those were self-inflicted, plenty of judgments established that).

  That word. Chibato. Snitch. Misspelled with a b instead of a v. Because it was true. Even though it happened under torture, he’d given his two friends up – “Moulinaou Street, in Angelu.” Because he should have been there instead of one of his friends. Because he didn’t have a driver’s license. Because not having one changed what was supposed to have been his first mission, which would have led him to suffer a degree of torture far worse than the one he’d experienced, and would have ultimately killed him.

  What he obviously never told Idoia was what he did when they let him go free. How he went to Angelu and found the house on Moulinaou Street where Soto and Zeberio hid half empty; how worried the owners of the house were about them; how the Redhead watched mistrustfully from a nearby bistro without coming anywhere near him and, how, remembering Soto’s paranoia, when he was left alone in it, he searched his room from top to bottom and found Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and a salmon-pink folder, and inside all of Soto’s typewritten manuscripts, hidden under a blanket with the winter bedding, invisible to everyone, on the highest part of the wardrobe.

  And Idoia, even though there was barely a trace of the letters branded on Diego’s back anymore, still saw them, she saw that chibato, and she saw the snitch too. She began to regret having fallen into Diego’s arms so easily, although she realized she had no right to think like that, that Diego wasn’t guilty, that it was hard enough for him and he was tormented enough as it was, that he’d paid the price for his sin a thousand times over with the accumulated insomnia of all those years, while the men who tortured him walked the streets freely, probably not too far from there, not having lost any stripes and having probably earned a medal or two for their inestimable service to the motherland.

  Things were getting worse for Idoia at work. She complained a lot, especially since they started asking her for radio collaborations. “Comprehensive journalism.” They were exploiting workers without any qualms.

  “What do the regulations say? Surely what they’re asking of you is not legal…”

  If only it were so easy, Idoia tells herself. In truth, they hardly saw each other: by the time she arrived home, Diego was already under lock and key in his study, writing. She ate dinner alone. By the time he went to bed it was six or seven in the morning. They’d barely spend an hour together in bed before Idoia would get up to catch the bus and go to work. In circumstances such as these, their sexual relationship could only be somnambulist. They only had weekends together, and even then indifference reigned: by midday Diego would push away the copy of El Mundo and start reading Berria, old Egin’s new incarnation, displaying his scorn for the newspaper Idoia worked for quite blatantly. While Diego prepared coffee and grapefruit juice – his usual breakfast – Idoia ate a light meal. They couldn’t even share that. Theirs was a perpetual jet lag reaching from opposite directions.

  “I’m thinking of leaving the newspaper.”

  “You could…money is not a problem right now.”

  “I won’t leave until I have something else lined up.”

  “I could get you work as a reader if you want…is that something that might interest you?”

  “As a reader?”

  “Fede always needs readers at the publisher’s…they don’t last long, you know how grumpy he is. But you could give it a go…”

  “Would I need to write reports?”

  “Not exactly. His eyesight is failing and he needs someone to read out loud to him. I think that with your voice…”

  Fede Epelde, Diego’s editor. A sybaritic, grumbling sixty-something. No, thanks. She’d rather stay where she was than go and work for him.

  Not many months after Idoia substituted a dead relationship for a stimulating one, the new one started to decline. She left her husband without a second thought, it came easily, which would seem to indicate that she’d been ready to take the leap for a while. But that didn’t at all guarantee the solidity or longevity of the new relationship. Truth be told, the spark died down pretty quickly. Diego was jealous to the core. He detected potential rivals in all Idoia’s interviewees. They were mostly second- and third-rate politicians, people who bored Idoia to death, but Diego, always on the threshold of paranoia, sensed that interviewees went into full peacock display at the expense of the interviewer. Things got worse when the newspaper strengthened its culture section and Idoia, her hopes somewhat renewed, started interviewing dancers, actors, and writers every now and then. According to Diego, they were all mediocre, secondhand artists, parasites who lived off public subsidies without ever lifting a finger. That’s why she was surprised that when she interviewed Txema Santamaria, Diego had nothing but sweet praise for him.

  “That’s a really interesting guy. Compared to all the other good-for-nothings…he’s got a very good head on him.”

  Idoia was surprised because by that point they never agreed on anything and, for once, she thought the same. To her, Santamaria had always seemed a seducer through and through, someone with very clear ideas, a hyperconscious photographer who knew that what he did was only for a minority; a hipster committed to the olden ways who developed his Ilford films at home in a darkroom and wouldn’t print many copies of each negative, someone who was always in search of new horizons, who was so different from all the other photographers she’d met at the newspapers.

  Lazkano’s comment surprised Idoia more so when she realized that Txema was a dear friend of Lazkano, even though they hadn’t seen much of each other in the past few years; that his first book’s author photograph, “the best portrait anyone has ever taken of me,” was Txema’s work. Idoia could only agree, the photo was gorgeous, all chiaroscuros, the kind you never tire of looking at. He showed her the portraits he’d taken of the members of the theater group: Zeberio with a stage light’s lead wrapped around his neck as if it were a scarf, Soto dressed as Groucho Marx, Gloria, baton in her hand, indulging her director’s role, Diego sitting with his arms around Ana’s and Sara’s shoulders. All of them smiling.

  “Ana…you two made a good couple.”

  She meant it, but said it intending to hurt him. Diego welled up. “Yes, I remember her every morning, I abandoned her; I too know how to disappear from someone’s life without warning.” He thinks it, but he doesn’t say it.

  “And this one?”

  “We used to call her La Bella Ines, don’t you remember her? She used to join us in every demonstration…”

  “The same girl who was in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap?”

  “The very same one.”

  “She’s so young here…I wouldn’t have recognized her.”

  “And the photographer, Txema, of course. We could have him over for dinner sometime, if you’d like.”

  Idoia agreed at the beginning, but tried to dissuade Diego after a while. She d
idn’t want to have Txema over for dinner, she liked him too much, he might become the escape point from the routine that bound her to Diego – that photographer was a lover and she knew she could easily jump into his arms, he was more than “a really interesting guy.” Obviously, she didn’t say any of this to Diego.

  “We’ve both been in a bad mood lately, let’s give it some time.”

  “What?”

  Idoia was beginning to get tired of having to repeat everything twice. “What?” “How?” It was never enough to say things once, Diego was always lost in his thoughts; when a couple started with that kind of stuff – what, how, say that again – it was a sign that things were coming to an end. But the end can last a long time. Even a whole lifetime, in some cases. Mostly because Idoia didn’t want to admit that moving in with Lazkano, betting on him, putting all her chips on one number, had been a great mistake.

  “What?”

  “I’m saying it’s not the best time to invite anyone over. Maybe he didn’t like the interview. We spent two hours in his studio, I’ve had to edit the content a lot…I might be uncomfortable.”

  “Nonsense. I’m sure he’s going to find it so funny that you and I are together.”

  And Diego, stubborn: “I’m going to call him.” And he does. “Don’t do it, Diego, don’t you realize? You’re letting the wolf into your house; you gave your friends up once, under torture, and now you’re giving yourself up, you’ll regret it, don’t encourage your old friend: he’s much more interesting than you.” She thinks it, but she doesn’t say it.