The Flanders Panel

But there was no card that night, and she could devote herself to looking after Menchu, who seemed to be moving in a fog. Julia gave her two cups of coffee before putting her to bed. Feeling like a psychiatrist seated by her couch, she gradually managed, with great patience, to reconstruct out of the incoherent babblings exactly what had happened. At the worst possible moment, Max, ungrateful Max, had got it into his head to go off on a trip, some stupid story about a job in Portugal. She was having a bad time and his going off like that seemed a selfish dereliction of duty. They’d argued, and instead of resolving the problem in bed, as they usually did, he’d slammed the door on her. Menchu didn’t know if he intended to come back or not, but she didn’t give a damn either way. Determined not to be alone, she’d gone to Stephan’s. A few lines of coke had helped to clear her head, leaving her in a state of aggressive euphoria. With Max forgotten, she sat in her corner drinking very dry martinis and eyeing a gorgeous guy who’d noticed her. Then the mood of the night suddenly changed. Unfortunately for Paco Montegrifo, he turned up too, accompanied by one of those bejewelled bitches he was seen with from time to time. The matter of the percentages was still fresh in her mind and she thought she detected a certain irony in the way he greeted her. As they say in novels, it was like a knife being turned in the wound. She delivered a single slap, thwack, a real humdinger, that caused a great stir amongst the clientele. A huge uproar ensued, end of story. Curtain.

Julia put a blanket over Menchu and sat by her for a while. She finally got to sleep at about two in the morning. Sometimes she flailed about and uttered unintelligible words, her lips pressed together, her hair all over her face. Julia looked at the lines around her mouth and lips, at the black smudges where tears and sweat had made her make-up run. It gave her a pathetic look: the look of an ageing courtesan after a bad night. No doubt Cesar would have drawn some scathing conclusion, but Julia didn’t feel like thinking about Cesar. She found herself praying to life to give her the necessary spirit of resignation to grow old with dignity when her turn came. It must be terrible, at the moment of shipwreck, not to have a solid raft on which to save oneself. She realised that Menchu was old enough to be her mother, and felt ashamed at the thought, as if in some way she’d taken advantage of her friend’s sleep in order to betray her.

She drank what remained of her coffee, cold now, and lit a cigarette. The rain was once more beating down on the skylight, the sound of solitude, she thought sadly. It reminded her of that other rainy night, a year ago, when she’d ended her relationship with Alvaro and knew that something had broken inside her for ever, like a faulty mechanism beyond repair. And she knew too that, from then on, the bittersweet solitude that filled her heart would be her one sure companion as she walked what roads were left for her to follow, beneath a heaven in which the gods were slowly dying amidst great gales of laughter. That night she had crouched beneath the shower, steam curling about her like scalding mist, her tears mingling with the water falling in torrents on her drenched hair and her naked body. That clean, warm water had washed Alvaro away a year before his physical and definitive death. And by one of those strange ironies of which Fate is so fond, that was how Alvaro had ended his life, in a bathtub, with his eyes wide open and his neck broken, beneath the shower, beneath the rain.

She dismissed the memory, saw it vanish, amongst the shadows in her studio. Then she thought about Cesar and moved her head slowly to the rhythm of a melancholy, imaginary music. At that moment, she would have liked to lean her head on his shoulder, close her eyes and breathe in the delicate smell of tobacco and myrrh that she’d known since she was little, the smell that meant Cesar. And to relive with him all those stories in which you knew beforehand there would be a happy ending. How far away they seemed, those days of happy endings, incompatible with any kind of mature lucidity! It was hard sometimes to look at herself in the mirror and know that she was in eternal exile from Never-Never-Land.