Free This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets Page A

invented, turned you into a selfish monster. When I told you I couldn’t leave the children by themselves at four in the morning, you’d get outraged and hang up on me. Most of our conversations during the last few months ended with you hanging up on me. Every time the phone rang and I saw your number, my heart would skip a beat. Finally I disconnected it, I forgot to charge it, I left it everywhere, I lost it on purpose. Occasionally I’d answer thinking, today she’s calling just to tell me she loves me and she’s sorry for having abandoned me, and you’d called to talk about money and to reproach me because I was the one who had abandoned you. I did my best, sometimes I did what I had to do, though not always—I’m not very good at facing despair. I’m sorry. Maybe if you’d been in my shoes, you’d have done a better job. For years, you said that you had never loved your mother, that she wasn’t a good person, that she’d never loved you. It wasn’t until the bitter end that you changed your mind. Those last days in the hospital you mistakenly called me “Mama” a few times. My grandmother had a very distinguished, silent, elegant, and fearless death as befitted her status and character. Yours was total mayhem. Nobody warns you that you have to become your mother when she’s dying. And, Mom, you can’t say you gave me so much satisfaction as your daughter, either. You yourself weren’t an easy daughter.
    But since Santi has reappeared, the cell phone has become something playful again, and we’re always just one message away from what can happen next. And what can happen next is almost always more exciting than what is happening now. I like sex because it nails me into the present time. Your death did too. Not Santi, no, Santi is the same as a cell phone. I’m always waiting for something wonderful to come that never does. He was separated from his wife when we met. She was having an affair with a friend of his, but the affair didn’t pan out, and Santi, who is a very nice man, went back home with the idea of healing the wounds and mending a relationship that had fallen into the trap of substituting comfort, companionship, and children for sex, curiosity, and admiration. And our affair, which had already begun to flag a few months in—most love affairs last either a few months or an entire lifetime—was stirred back to life with the thrill of the forbidden, the unattainable, the fantasy. Both of us swallowed the narrative whole. Me because I hadn’t found anyone I liked better. Him because he realized right away that the relationship with his wife was going right back into the rut it came from, the last page before closing a book. There is no reverse in a love story; any relationship is always a one-way street.
    He texts me that he just got in, he really wants to see me. And so my head once again succumbs to my body, and your death recedes a few more steps into the distance, and as if by magic, my frozen blood begins to flow again. I joke around with the children, I sniff at the food, I lie down on the ground to play with my goddaughter, I hug Sofía, I whisper into Pep’s ear that we have a mountain of dope, I pet the cat, I devour olives like a madwoman, I tell everyone to go out and just look at the moon. I put music on and tell Elisa we should go dancing.
    —He just texted, I whisper to Sofía.
    —I thought so. Your face changed so drastically I knew something was up.
    —It’s strange. I don’t really even like him that much.
    —Blanquita, I think you like him that much, you just don’t want to admit it.
    —Maybe I do, I don’t know.
    We have dinner in the garden outside. The candles are lit and there are a few Chinese lanterns swaying from the branches of the olive tree. Their shadows sway over the pristine crust of the salt-cooked fish the men have prepared; there’s tomato and cucumber salad and croquettes, and recently baked olive bread. Children and adults alike are tanned and