'Of course,' he said, supporting Paula's insincere suggestion and pointing at his wife. 'We're driving back to Barcelona tonight. If you want we can stop in Gerona and drop you off at home.'
I looked with relief into Paula's eyes.
'You wouldn't mind?'
All eyes converged on her. I knew she minded, but she said, 'Of course not.'
I accompanied Gabriel and Paula to the car and, when Gabriel was stretched out on the back seat, exhausted, Paula closed the door and muttered, 'Next time you can go to your party by yourself.'
'Didn't you say you wouldn't mind if I stayed?'
'You're a bastard.'
We argued; I don't remember what we said, but as I watched my car disappear as fast as possible down the gravel driveway that led out of the property I thought what I'd thought so often during that time: that a moment arrives in the life of every couple when everything they say they say to hurt each other, that my marriage had turned into a refined form of torture and the sooner it ended the better for all concerned.
But I soon forgot about my fight with Paula and continued enjoying the party. It went on into the early hours, and when I got into the screenwriter's car I found myself sitting beside a very serious young woman with an intellectual air, who I'd barely noticed all night. The trip to Gerona was brief, but long enough for me to realize that the girl had had quite a bit to drink, to be sure she was flirting with me and to vaguely ascertain that she was a friend of the host's niece and worked for a local television station. When we got to the city the girl suggested we all go for one more drink at a bar that belonged to some friends of hers, and which, she said, never closed before dawn. The screenwriter and his wife declined the offer arguing that it was very late and they should keep going to Barcelona; I accepted.
We went to the bar. We drank, chatted, danced and I finished off the night in the girl's bed. When I left her house dawn was about to break. In the street the taxi I'd phoned was waiting for me; I gave the driver my address and dozed the whole way, but when the taxi stopped at the door of my house I wished I were dead: standing in front of a squad car, two Mossos d'Esquadra were waiting beside the driveway that led to the garage. I paid the taxi driver with a trembling note, and as I got out of the car I noticed the driveway, where we usually parked the car, was empty, and I knew that Paula and Gabriel weren't home.
'What's happened?' I asked as I approached the two officers.
Young, grave, almost spectral in the livid light of daybreak, they asked me if I was me. I said I was.
'What's happened?' I repeated.
One of the policemen pointed to the door of my house and asked: 'Could we speak to you inside for a moment, please?'
I opened the door for the two policemen, we sat in the dining room, I asked again what had happened. The policeman who'd spoken before was the one to answer me.
'We've come to inform you that your wife and your son have been involved in an accident,' he said.
The news didn't surprise me; with a thread of a voice I managed to ask: 'Are they injured?'
The policeman swallowed before he answered: 'They're dead.'
The policeman then took out a notebook and must have begun an antiseptic and detailed account of the circumstances of the accident, but, despite making an effort to pay attention to the explanation, the only thing I could catch were random words, incoherent or meaningless phrases. My memory of the hours that followed is even more shaky: I know I went to the hospital where they'd taken Paula and Gabriel that morning, that I didn't see or didn't want to see their bodies, that relatives and the odd friend immediately started arriving, that I made some confusing arrangement for funerals, which took place the next day, that I didn'tattend them, that some newspaper included my name in the article about the accident and that my house filled up with telegrams and faxes of condolence that I didn't read or that I read as veiled accusations. In reality, there's only one thing I remember from those days with an hallucinatory clarity — my visits to the Mossos d'Esquadra headquarters. In a very short space of time I was there four times, maybe five, although now they all seem like the same one. I was received in an office by a pretty, cold, painstakingly professional uniformed sergeant, who, sitting across from me behind a very cheerful desk, with flowers and family photographs, set out for me the information the police had gathered concerning the accident, sketched diagrams and answered my questions over and over again. They were long meetings, but, despite the causes and circumstances of the accident not raising any doubts for the police (the road surface made slippery by the damp night air, maybe a tiny distraction, a curve taken a bit faster than advisable, a desperate swerve into the oncoming lane, the final horror of blinding lights in front of you), I always left them with new questions, which I'd return to try to clear up at the station hours or days later. The sergeant arranged a meeting for me with the two officers who'd arrived first at the scene of the accident and been in charge of the investigation and, in the company of one of them, took me one afternoon to the exact curve where it had happened; the next morning I went back to the place alone and stayed there for a while, watching the cars go past, not thinking about anything, looking at the sky and the asphalt and the desolation of that piece of open ground swept by the north wind. I couldn't say why I acted like that, but I wouldn't rule out the idea that part of me suspected that something didn't quite tally, there were still loose ends in that story, the police were hiding something from me and, if I could discover what it was, that a door would immediately open and Paula and Gabriel would walk through it, alive and smiling, just as if it had all been a mistake or a bad joke. Until one morning, when I walked into the sergeant's office for our umpteenth interview, I found her accompanied by an older man, with a beard and civilian clothes. The sergeant introduced us and the man explained that he was a psychologist and director of an association called Bereavement Support Services (or something like that), assigned to offer help to relatives of people killed in accidents. The psychologist carried on with his presentation for a while, but I stopped listening to him; I didn't even look at him: I confined myself to looking at the sergeant, who tired of avoiding my eyes and interrupted the man.
'Take my advice and go with him,' she said, finally meeting my gaze, and for the first time I perceived a trace of cordiality or emotion in her voice. 'There's nothing more I can do for you.'
I left the station and never went back. That same afternoon I went to a real estate agency, rented the first apartment they offered me in Barcelona, a flat near Sagrada Familia, and, after selling the house in Gerona at a loss as quickly as possible and getting rid of all of Gabriel's and Paula's belongings, I moved into it and prepared to busy myself conscientiously with the job of dying, and not with that of being born. I discovered that Rodney's father was right and the world was an empty place; but I also discovered that in those moments solitude was less a bane for me than the only possible balm, the only possible blessing. I didn't see my family, I didn't see my friends, I didn't have a television or a radio or a telephone. Aside from that I made sure that only the absolutely indispensable people had my address, and when one of them (or someone who had located me through one of them) knocked on my door, I simply didn't answer. That happened with Marcos Luna, who for a while appeared regularly at my house and got sick of ringing the bell knowing I was inside, listening to him, until he realized that he wasn't going to get to talk to me and from then on he just left in my mailbox, every Friday at lunchtime, a cigarette packet full of freshly rolled joints. My literary agent also sent me a list of the people who called her office requesting my presence somewhere or asking after me every once in a while, although I never answered. Of course, I didn't work, but the sales of the book had provided me with enough income to live without working for years, and I didn't see any reason not to let time go by until that money ran out. My only effort consisted in not thinking, especially in not remembering. At first it had been impossible. Until I left the house I'dshared with Paula and Gabriel and went to Barcelona I couldn't stop torturing myself thinking about the accident: I wondered if Gabriel had woken up at the last moment and been aware of what was about to happen; I wondered what Paula had thought at that moment, what memory had distracted her as she drove, provoking the swerve that in its turn had provoked the accident, what would have happened if, instead of staying at the party, I'd gone home with them. . Those who experienced the programmed brutality of the Nazi or Soviet concentration camps often say that, to bear it, they kept themselves going by remembering the happiness they'd left behind, because, remote though it may have been, they always held on to the hope that they might one day recover it; I lacked that comfort: since the dead don't come back to life, my past was irretrievable, so I applied myself conscientiously to obliterating it. Maybe that's why, as soon as I installed myself in Barcelona, I began to live by night. I sometimes spent entire weeks without leaving the house, reading detective novels in bed, living on packets of soup, tinned food, tobacco, marijuana and beer, but normally I'd spend the nights outside, traipsing relentlessly all over the city, walking aimlessly, stopping now and then to have a drink and rest awhile and get my strength back before continuing my walk to nowhere until dawn, when I'd return home wrecked and throw myself into bed, desperate for rest and unable to sleep, maddened by other people's noises in the world, which incredibly kept to its imperturbable course. Insomnia turned me into a passionate theoretician of suicide, and I now think that if I didn't put it into practice it wasn't only due to cowardice or excess of imagination, but also because I feared my remorse would survive me, or more likely because I discovered that, more than to die, what I desired was never to have lived at all, and that's why sometimes I managed a clear, dreamless sleep when I imagined myself living in the pure limbo of non-existence, in the happiness before light, before words. I took to playing with death. Sometimes I'd take the car and drive obsessively and rashly for days on end, on a whim, stopping only to eat or to sleep, comforted by the permanent certainty that at any moment I could swerve or go into a skid like the one that had killed Gabriel and Paula. One night, in a brothel in Montpellier, I got involved in a meaningless argument with two individuals who ended up giving me a beating that put me in hospital, from which I emerged with my body black and blue and my nose broken. I also bought a pistoclass="underline" I kept it in a drawer and took it out every once in a while, loaded it and pointed it at my forehead or under my chin or put it in my mouth and held it there, tasting the acidity of the barrel and gently caressing the trigger while sweat poured down my temples and my panting seemed to thunder in my head and fill the silence of the flat to bursting. One night I spent a long time walking along the parapet of my roof terrace, happy, naked and precariously balanced, with my mind a blank, aware only of the breeze that made my skin bristle and the lights of the city and the vertiginous precipice gaping beside me, humming a song I've now forgotten.