Free This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets

fabulous views overlooking the town and the bay. When I was young, the apartments had been a sort of hippie colony, where colorful characters from around the world lived. I remember listening to the music and laughter from my bed at night, the din of that group of beautiful summer castaways who I thought were just the most fascinating and exotic people on earth, who returned to Holland, the United States, or Germany at summer’s end. As I got older, so did the hippies, and the apartments began filling with modern people of the nineties, respectable and rich. But those of us who were lucky enough to catch a glimpse through the keyhole of childhood at the tail end of the spirit of the sixties—the sexual freedom, the freedom, period, the desire to have fun, the empowerment of youth, the sheer audacity—weren’t left unscathed. We’ve all lost some paradise to which we never belonged.
    Pep and Hugo are preparing dinner. They’ve dressed for a summer night. Clean jeans, a perfectly old and faded shirt for Pep and a crisp white shirt with rolled-up sleeves for Hugo. They’re both tanned. Hugo likes to run and he wears string bracelets. He smells a little of patchouli and vanilla and he owns some sort of business. Pep is a photographer, his head is shaved, and he has a deep voice. Tall and thin, he’s the sensitive type, discreet and very funny. You can tell they’ve been close friends for a long time—they even finish each other’s sentences, poke fun at each other, refer to each other as “bro.” There are no fissures, no doubts; they get together every week to watch football and drink beer. Sometimes I envy this kind of male bonding; seen from the outside it seems like a straighter and more effortless style of friendship than what exists between women. Ours is like an eternal courtship, with its rough patches, intense and passionate, while theirs is more like a well-matched marriage, without strong emotions, maybe, but without boundless ups and downs, either.
    —So, are we hungry? Pep asks the children.
    —Very, Sofía answers, diving into the hummus.
    We sit at a table in the garden. Hugo opens the wine and sits down next to me, smiling.
    —You look beautiful, he says.
    —Well, Nico told me I looked like cat food this morning. And children never lie.
    —That’s an urban myth. Children lie as much as adults do.
    —I guess. I lie all the time. And it’s not even my worst defect.
    We both laugh. He says: —Why don’t we go out for dinner sometime, just the two of us? And I try to convince him that I’m a complete mess and that inviting me to dinner isn’t worth the effort. The male technique for seduction involves making a fake list of one’s own defects (I’m a sale item, don’t waste your time on me); it works pretty well, I see, enjoying myself as I eat and play with my cell phone. I don’t lose it all the time anymore. The phone became a diabolical object, the messenger of suffering and anguish during your illness and death. You called every night in the wee hours, demanding that I go to your house, to tell me you were afraid, that the home-nurse tried to kill you. You might have been partly right. I can’t count the number of nurses you went through in the last months, but I became an expert at interviewing candidates, most of whom never lasted more than a few days. You didn’t allow them a minute’s sleep; you’d steal the medication—there were pills scattered all over the house, the floors, in your sheets, in your papers and the pages of your books, I started to fear for the dogs; you fired the nurses two or three times a day, you even punched one of them. What a shame the main character of the story was you. If someone had told us these stories about someone else back in the good old days, we probably would have split our sides laughing. A good laugh was always our best weapon; it’s how we dealt with misery and mean-spiritedness. The disease, the pain that some doctors claimed you