It was precisely in a taxi, five days later, that he concluded it was foolish to spend a fortune every day on taxis while his car gathered dust in the lot. He thought about selling the car. But soon dismissed the idea: it was generated by indignation and was consequently OTT. There must be a solution that perhaps his nerves were blocking out. For the moment, he would take one step: as he was reluctant to take a taxi when his car was in the lot (so as not to take his car without the radio, or with the radio and then have to carry it around), he’d stay at home and not go out. Besides, if he really must, he could always walk to the bar, the shop, the restaurant, or wherever he wanted to go. However, this decision seriously limited his field of action—unless he was ready to spend three hours getting somewhere and three hours getting back.

  On the eighth day of staying in at night, he felt so bored he extracted the TV from the junk room, where he’d put it weeks before, when he started dating that girl who reckoned it was trendy again not to watch television. He dusted it. He plugged it in. They were showing a movie with Jean-Louis Trintignant. After a quarter of an hour the screen turned magenta. He switched it off. He unplugged it and put it back in the junk room. He grabbed his jacket, went out, walked to an emporium three streets away, and bought a new television (a huge one with a rectangular screen); he came home with the technician, connected it, and looked for the channel that was showing the Jean-Louis Trintignant movie.

  When the movie finished, it was followed by a made-for-TV movie whose main character was the son of a policeman who, without his father realizing, was helping him solve his cases. Then, the news. Then, a word-guessing competition. In order to participate, you had to send in a label from a well-known canned vegetable company inside an envelope with your name, address, and telephone number. They would select one envelope from the pile. If it was yours, they called you and you had to answer one simple question (live). If you got the right answer, you could participate in the game and try to guess, letter by letter, the word made by the blank squares on the panel. Every square carried a letter and a photo. The photos: different amounts of money, an apartment on the coast, a set of home appliances, a temple in Bangkok, a video camera, a bicycle, a car, and a beach in the Caribbean. Each one indicated the prize won. The simpler the letter, the lower the prize. The trickier the letter, the more valuable the prize. If a competitor opted for easy vowels or consonants, he’d win very little. If you tried to win the big prizes, it involved more unusual letters, and you probably wouldn’t get them and you wouldn’t complete the word, meaning you wouldn’t win any prize at all.

  The next morning he bought a can of vegetables of the requisite brand, removed the label, and sent it off. A week later, he watched as they selected his letter. They called him immediately. They asked him the simplest question. Which of the following products didn’t the sponsoring firm can?: peas, green beans, tuna, or carrots? He chose the correct answer: tuna. They went on to the panel with the mystery word. Sr Trujillo said the letters. He completed the word: “instability.” The “A” won him bundles of twenty-five thousand pesetas. The “T”s, bundles of a hundred thousand. The “S”, a television with teletext, and the “N”, an apartment on the coast.

  The apartment was in a three-story building with a communal garden. The neighbor downstairs was a bald Dutchman who spent the day tending his flowers, one of those retired Northerners who decide to spend the last years of their lives in a cheap, warm country, where retirement money goes a lot further. The upstairs neighbors were a couple. He often met them on the stairs, or heard them moving about in their place. They arrived on Saturday morning and left on Sunday evening. Sr Trujillo went every weekend. He left the city on Friday evening (in his car, with the radio installed) and returned on Sunday at dusk.

  One Saturday, the upstairs neighbors invited him to dinner. He accepted. She was Raquel. He, Bplzznt. They dined on avocado and shrimp cocktail and roast beef with gravy. They drank two bottles of wine. They put on some music. The couple danced. Afterward, while Bplzznt poured their whiskeys, Raquel, all smiles, forced Sr Trujillo to dance with her. He was aroused by being cheek to cheek. When the song was finished, he sat on the sofa. So did the couple. They told him about their line of work and how long they’d been married. They wanted to have lots of children. Sr Trujillo left at 1 A.M. He went to sleep, listening to the couple chatting a good long time.

  At midday the next morning somebody knocked on his door. It was Raquel and Bplzznt, who were going to the beach. They invited him to join them. As he had nothing else to do, he agreed. They went to a cove that Raquel and Bplzznt knew, out of the way, with three big, equidistant rocks in the water. Nobody else was on the beach. They stretched out on their towels. The couple went for a swim. They swam out to one of the rocks, some hundred yards away. Sr Trujillo dozed off. He was woken up by shouting. He stood up. A few yards from the rock, Raquel was waving her arms, calling for help. Sr Trujillo jumped into the sea. He was hardly a strong swimmer. When he reached her, he felt exhausted, but he joined in Raquel’s efforts to search for Bplzznt. To no avail. On the way back to the beach, Raquel sobbed as she told him that Bplzznt had started swimming toward the other rock and, halfway, had started to call for help. Cramps, no doubt.

  The police found the corpse after a few hours. He was buried two days later. His wife didn’t return to the apartment for three weekends. On the fourth, she did. When Sr Trujillo heard footsteps overhead, he went up. The woman threw herself into his arms and burst into tears. He was aroused by being cheek-to-cheek. He stroked her hair to console her and they started to kiss. They sat on the sofa holding hands. Now and then, one, then the other, removed a hand, picked up a handkerchief, and wiped the tears away. They decided on marriage that same night. They married the following Friday. Once married, they decided to sell one of the apartments. They sold Sr Trujillo’s, because if they sold Raquel’s and went to live in Sr Trujillo’s, their new upstairs neighbors might prove to be very noisy. With the money they made, they refurbished Sr Trujillo’s apartment in the city. Two years later they had a baby boy. They named him Bplzznt, in memory of her dead husband. A year later they had a baby girl. The ideal pair! They named her Clara, after Sr Trujillo’s mother. Their third child (two years later) was also a girl. They named her Chachacha.

  Every weekday morning, before going to the office, Sr Trujillo grabs his briefcase and the boy with one hand and the girls with the other and takes them to school. Bplzznt is now six, Clara, five, and Chachacha, three. First he leaves the boy at the middle school, then the elder girl at elementary school, and the youngster at kindergarten. Then Sr Trujillo walks down the stairs, greets the odd father or mother he meets on the way, ruffles the hair of a boy he knows, and goes back to their block. He gets into his car, takes the radio from his briefcase: he purchased the briefcase so he could conceal the radio inside when he walks his children to school. He inserts the radio, switches it on, tunes in to a program, puts his hands over his face, and, with all the strength he can muster, tries to cry, but the tears never come.

  ST. VALENTINE’S

  THE MAN WHO NEVER FALLS IN LOVE LEAVES THE MUSEUM AND sits down on a bench in the square opposite. When he was looking at a Manolo Hugué drawing in the museum he met a woman with deep, sparkling, slightly mischievous eyes, and thought that maybe he could fall in love with her. He also thinks that it isn’t just her sparkling, slightly mischievous eyes he likes about her. It’s also the way she speaks. The whole time they spoke in the museum, she didn’t utter a single cliché or parrot any received wisdom she’d learned by heart. That’s why, after they said goodbye, he followed her at a distance, until he saw her go into a building entrance; now he’s waiting.

  From a very early age, the man who never falls in love had intuited that it wouldn’t be easy to find the woman of his dreams. As a baby he looked at his babysitter’s white socks and legs, and something inside him said it was going to be a rough ride. Especially because he didn’t have a clear idea what the woman of his dreams should be like, or, (in fact) whether there would be one. He had no preferences. He didn’t imagine her small or tall, blonde or brunette. Nor was he worried about her being especially intelligent, or simple-minded, as some preferred. At the age of five he fell in love with the daughter of the owners of the stationery store near home, where he bought pencils, erasers, pens, nibs, ink, and spiral notebooks. Naturally, he never told her. It was a secret love that kept him awake at night, tossing and turning in his bed, with the image of the bookseller’s daughter in his mind’s eye: those sparkling, slightly mischievous eyes. Even now, when he thinks of the woman he could fall in love with, he thinks of those sparkling, slightly mischievous eyes. One day, however, her parents sold their store, left the city, and he never heard of her again. He longed for her. To the point that he felt ever more regretful that all he knew about her was that she’d lived opposite and he’d never dared declare himself. He didn’t fall in love again until he was eight. He didn’t know this at the time, but it would be the last time he fell in love. He fell in love with his big sister’s friend, who often came to their house to play. He felt guilty about falling in love with her: it seemed like a betrayal of the stationery-store owner’s daughter. His sister’s friend must have been twelve and he, a mere eight-year-old, would get nowhere with her. Maybe when he grew up and the distances that now seemed unbridgeable became more relative … Then the years went by at a hundred miles an hour, ever more quickly. He’s nineteen now. He came of age a year ago. One more year and he would be twenty. Twenty! He’d never have thought he’d get that far, between the ages of twelve and fourteen he’d had this mystical intuition he would die before he reached twenty: in a car or motorbike accident, or else by committing suicide. His worry is: will he never fall in love again? He hasn’t been in love with anyone for ten years and is beginning to long for those sleepless nights, tossing and turning in bed, with his beloved in his mind’s eye. Maybe that’s what becoming an adult is all about. At the end of the day, he ruminates, falling in love is a symptom of immaturity, a sign that one isn’t sufficiently independent. What he can’t understand is how he can miss something that is rationally so harmful. Why does he feel so empty? Why didn’t he fall in love with Marta, the girl he met in his drawing class? She had many good qualities. And defects. But defects you can forgive. Like all defects: indeed, all defects can be forgiven. That was what he thought when he decided to break up with her. But why forgive Marta’s and anyone else’s? If you have to love someone, if loving really means what it’s supposed to, petty defects shouldn’t irritate you. And Marta’s defects do irritate him. She is presumptuous and obsessive. Obviously she is warm, understanding, and welcoming. But Neus is also warm, understanding and welcoming. Neus, on the other hand, has the drawback that she is too banal, that she’s never had an original thought. That drawback is complemented by her aggressive attitude (because she is insecure). A kind of aggression that is typical of people who go clubbing and are quick, as the music blasts away, to show that they are interesting. They manufacture the image of being interesting through acerbic, pre-fabricated phrases, which can be easily inserted at any point in the conversation. And what about Tessa? Tessa is intelligent, witty, and amusing. And they interpenetrate. They only have to glance at each other across a restaurant table to know, without saying a word, from the glint in their eyes, what they are thinking, who they find boring. What’s more, they get on wonderfully well in bed. Conversely, she is a spoiled child, who puckers her lips when she’s refused some whim. Moreover, she is lethargic and spends the day supine on the sofa, languidly smoking a never-ending cigarette. Quite unlike Anna, who is always doing something. She is a dynamo who inspires a desire to live. But what is Anna’s defect? That she is possessive like no other woman he has ever known, and in the months they dated controlled him day and night, and was always doubting he loved her as much as she loved him. Which was true. Because he never managed to love her however hard he tried. He’s fond of her, appreciates her … But love, as in true love … And it’s not as if he is chasing an unattainable ideal. He’s not so idiotic as to think he’ll find someone without defects. If you really love someone, their defects are consigned to a drawer and not a constant sore point. He tried to love her. Just as he tried to love Tessa, Neus, and Marta. He’d give up his life to be in love with any of them. Because it would be worthwhile falling in love with any of them; if it weren’t for that fact that, however hard he tries, he never succeeds. Why can’t he be like everyone else and fall in love? Sefa (another girl worthy of arousing love in anyone with a bit of nous) says it surely goes back to a childhood trauma. That neither his mother nor his father had shown him enough love and that is why he is as he is. Another original explanation is the one expressed by Cuqui, who told him on their last day together, before their final goodbye, that his problem is that he can’t love anyone because he only loves himself. Because he is an egotist unworthy of the love of the women who fall in love with him. What a great conclusion, if only it were true! And that is another side to it: lots of women fall in love with him. He can’t understand that. Why do they all fall in love with him with such frenzied passion? Why is he incapable of falling in love with any of them and properly requiting their feelings?

  While he is deep in such thoughts, the man who never falls in love watches as the girl he met in the museum emerges from the building entrance and turns down a street. He springs to his feet. He follows her. Gradually the distance between them shortens. The more he looks at her walking in front of him, the more he likes her, and from what he grasped in the museum, she likes him too. And what if it really went well this time? Now he is a few steps behind her; she’s with hand’s reach. He’d only have to tap her on the shoulder and she’d turn around.

  TROJAN EUPHORIA

  THE MAN WHO’D EXPERIENCED A DEGREE OF RELIGIOUS FAITH AS A child is no sluggard. He quickly slips out of the sheets, stretches, jumps up, and runs into the hallway to the bathroom, raising his knees very high like a soccer player in training. He shaves. The smell of his aftershave reinforces his faith in life. He dresses, closes his apartment door, walks whistling into the lift, alights on the ground floor, dodges people in the street, and enters the subway station close to home. He sticks his card in the slot at one end of the barrier, picks it up from the other, and walks through; as he goes down the stairs he hears a train leave and a crowd floods up both escalators and the stairs. He uses the time on the platform to look at movie posters. The next train arrives. Its doors open, he goes in, clings to a pole, and contemplates the face of a man whose eyelids are swollen shut. He looks away and stares at a kid who is observing him very intently.

  The man who had experienced a degree of religious faith as a child smiles at the kid. The kid sticks his tongue out. The man, who’d been interested in mathematics as a child, as well as enjoying a degree of religious faith, laughs. An inspector approaches, asking to see tickets. The man who’d been interested in mathematics as a child is amazed that inspectors still exist. He hasn’t seen one for years. That’s what he’s thinking as he rummages in his pockets, looking for the ticket that he had endorsed. He can’t find it. It’s not in his inside jacket pocket (which is where it should be) or in the outside ones, or in his pants’ pockets. It’s nowhere; the inspector loses patience.

  The man who’d been interested both in mathematics and religion takes out his wallet and opens it, though he doesn’t remember putting it there. Indeed, it isn’t there. He must have lost it. That’s what he tells the inspector: “I must have lost it.” The inspector fines him. The man who, as well as taking an interest in religion and mathematics, also had had problems socializing as a child, pays the fine, leaves the subway, and goes up to his office. He takes off his jacket and sits at his desk, still thinking about the inspector and the (pleasant) feeling of nostalgia he felt when he saw they still existed. He looks at the pile of folders heaped in front of him. He opens the first and settles down to work.

  Eight hours later he looks up, stands, puts on his jacket, leaves the building, and returns to the subway. He arrives home; his young son runs to welcome him, crying. He hugs his waist. Their dog has died; tears flood down the kid’s cheeks. The man who had problems socializing as a child, bends down, hugs his son, and tries to console him. He tells him the dog was very old, that they will buy another, as nice as the one that’s died. When his daughter gets back from her English class, he tries to break the news to her as gently as possible. When both children are in bed and he and his wife sit on the sofa in front of the TV, he takes her hand and says that these little upsets are what turn children into adults.

  The wife drinks a double gin. The man who, as well as his problems socializing in his youth, owned a leather blouson he still remembers, feels like going out for a drink when he sees his wife downing a double gin. He suggests contacting their babysitter and going out together. His wife refills her glass with gin and tells him to go out if he wants; she doesn’t want to.

  So he does. He goes to his usual bar. He stays two hours, drinking, talking, and flirting. He leaves at closing time. A female acquaintance leaves right when he does. The man who once owned a leather blouson that he still remembers asks whether he can give her a lift. She says no because she has her own car. Both get in their cars and drive off. A couple of streets later they meet at the same red traffic light, side by side. They look at each other. They smile. The light turns to green. They move off. They meet up at every red light and smile.